Braxton LeCroy interview

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Interview with Braxton LeCroy
Date of Interview : September )0, 1980; Camden , Alabama
Interviewer : Kathryn TUcker Windham
Transcriber : Edna O. Meek
Begin Side 1, Tape 1
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(Note: Mr . LeCroy and the interviewer are
looking at a collection of old photographs
(unidentified and undated) made at Gee's
Bend . )
Cammack was with Farm Security for ten years
over there .
All right , now ••••
He lived his life over there .
His ful l name was Mr • • • •• ?
William A. Cammack . W. A. Cammack.
And be came out of Cl arke County , didn ' t he?
Well , you might recall that there was a Mr .
Cammack who was head of the Vocational Educa­tion
Department , High School Education Depart­ment
of the State of Alabama. R. E. Cammack.
He was Dr . Cammack. Well , that was his brother .
So , anyway , Mr •••• before all this policy came
down from Washington , Mr . Cammack tried to run
it as he pleased ; and he was paternal and they
had to account to him for everything , and even
to the point ••• they didn't have any l aw enforce­ment
over there ; the law didn ' t even know they
existed, har dl y ; but they ' d work out their own
difficulties.
In Mr. Cammack's day , if somebody over there
caused trouble , like one br oke in the co- op
store over there , he was telling me about that,
and he was known as a trouble making young man
anyway; and when he broke in the store some of
them caught him . They knew it was him , and Mr .
Cammack got up the facts , and when he did, he
sent for the boy and his daddy , apd when they came
over there, Mr. Cammack told him , IIWe want you
to get out of Gee ' s Bend and we don ' t ever want
to see your face back her e no more . 11 And years
later , after I got over there , one of them told
me , said, l1you remember that boy Mr. Cammack
told to get out of Gee's Bend and don't ever
come back? 11 I said, "Yeah , I remember hearing
the story." He said , "Well , they fixing to
bring him back in a box. II I said, IIWbat
happened?" Sai d , IIHe was in some joint down in
Mobile , where he was living , drunk one night ,
Saturday night or something . The owner cal led
the pol ice , and when the pol icemen went in
there , he advanced on those two policemen with
a long bladed knife in his hand . They shot him
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down like be was a dog . 1I
Oh , what you need to know about this?
All right, when did you go down there?
Oh, I came to Wilcox County originally in
first of July; officially, the first of July,
1946. Mr. Cammack was still here , and I
handled all other real estate loans for us in
Wilcox County, other than Gae l s Bend . It was
real estate that year . They had liquidated
the old project , divided up all the land into
small farms , small farm units, and turned
around and liquidated the project ••• they
called it project liquidation ••• • and whatever
they bad paid into the • ••• on the account for
their homes , see , they bad a lease and purchase
contract during the project, a forty year deal.
They were l eaSing farm land but buying their
home . That ' s the purchase end of it . So over
about seven or eight years , they accumulated
a littl e equity in their homes . So somebody
had to calculate how much equity they had
created in that purchase account . So I used
to see those old project liquidation papers in
the file ; how much equity they had created,
and they ' d give them credit on that against the
purchase of the entire farm then. Then it
became straight out- and- out farm ownership
loans. Those would be family- size farms in that
day and time .
Why did they liquidate that project?
Because Congress ordered them to, allover
the United States . In most of them , they just
come in there cold blooded and that ' s every
one of them I ever heard of . There was a big
one up in Jackson County , near Scottsboro,
all white people . And they even built a
cotton mill for those folks up t here , give
them all farm wor k , and it all f l opped . They
didn 't anybody ••• the folks wouldn't cooperat e .
But they were a differ ent kind of people .
These over here were used to a white landlord ,
super vising them , advancing them in some manner;
might have even helped them get advances in
Camden , so they were used to that idea of
having an overlord, so to speak . And Mr.
Cammack was a good one . He was a good ol d man.
Lots of folks might not have liked him , but
I was crazy about him . I knew be was dedicated
to what he was trying to do.
After be l eft here, be worked for a time in
Choctaw County . He was getting up in years.
And even after he retired and went back to
Grove Hill, where they were or iginally f r om ,
he'd come up here occasionally and spend a
long week end . Come up like Friday and all of
his free time he could , he ' d go to Gee's Bend
and just knock around over there with those
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folks, and I might not even see him . Later
they 'd tell me , "Mr . Cammack was over here,
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Saturday, all day." He t d run up on me some-where
, start reminiscing and ask me about
80- and-so. Say, "Whatever became of him?U
Well , he was there when the project started,
then?
Yes, he was sent there . He was originally the
County Agent in Wilcox County, for about ten
years prior to that time . Then , when this
thing came along, he switched over and went
to work for Farm Security , as Project Manager .
That ' s what they called him , Project Manager .
And how much staff did he have?
I know at one time he had one assistant man , a
man assistant, Assistant County Supervisor, that
worked strictly over there for him; and one
Home Supervisor, who was a Home Ec graduate and
worked with the home end of it, with the women .
And that was, of course , just f rom scratch over
there working with those folks , with their
peculiar ideas . Like I said , as I told you
last night , I should have written a history .
They had a lot of African beliefs over there .
went all the way back .
Like what?
Oh , you know , superstitions. I can't remember
any particular ones , you see ; I never did make
a note of them. Of course , my mother and daddy ,
they were from the old school, and they had a lot
of old original superstitions; like , you know ,
to get rid of war t s, rub it wi th •• what is it? .
a spider web ; and then put the spider webs up
under the door steps . Seemed kind of stupid
to us children. We'd make fun of Mama about
it , and Boon as I got big enough, I learned to
quit making fun of Mama . She didn ' t have any
education , and Papa didn ' t either. What they
had was very short lived. Summertime education .
That's all they got back in the old days . See ,
my Father was born in 1871, and his Daddy hadn't
been long out of the Civil War when he was born .
Well , my Father was born in '69 , and mine went
to school three months all together , in his
whole l ife .
Well, they had a lot of those old African ••• I
wish I could remember some of them that they
were telling me about . And I wouldn ' t fight
them on it , you know, argue with them . Let
them believe it , if that 's what they wanted
to believe . And the majority of them were
i lliterate. Lot of them signed by mark, you
know . I never did do any of them like I heard
one somebody did . Went by ODe of them's house
and had a paper he wanted to get signed. Of
course , he signed by mark, so his wife said,
"He ' s gone off over the hill over there
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somewher e, but he's supposed to be coming
back in a little bit." So he just, they
told it on him, he stuck a pen up in the
ground in the front yard, and said, "When
he gets back , tell him to touch this pen,
I gatta go down to so-and-so ' s house , and
when I come back I'll get the pen and sign
his name for him." I didn ' t do quite that
bad. I let them know what they wer e signing,
whether they knew what I meant or not. But ,
everything ' s co- op . This is a pure bred boar.
These two hogs are pure bred, because all they
had was maybe r un down hogs, and they ' d try to
build up the qualit y of the livestock by getting
pure bred boars and pure bred bul ls .
Now , did the co-op , the store down there, continue
to operate after the project was liquidat ed?
Oh, yes. We had a store and gin, and a grist
mil l , combination . The store was one opera­tion
and the gin was another . And, as I recall
the figures on it, they origi nally borrowed
$20 , 000.00 from the government on co- op funds ,
to build the building , bui ld the gin , and I
don't know how they did it on $20,000.00. And
maybe a $1. 00 membership . Each one of them pay
a doll ar membership for each family , that
wouldn ' t have been but about $100 . 00 . A dollar
membership . But that was in the late thirties
when everything was cheap .
So they put up a one- stand gin down there with
a diesel engine that was big enough to pull .
I always laugh about that huge diesel engine
they had to pull that gin . Then they put a
gr ist mill out there , too . Grist mil l was on a
little wing shed, I remember, on the back of
the gin house , and, you know Mr . William Coll ins ,
up here at the Red and White (Grocery store in
Camden)? He was the manager for the stor e and
gin and all that complex; it was quite a complex
operation. It was over a hundred thousand
dol lar a year business . And the old manager
had l eft the business, and Mr . Nettles Ivey , I
don ' t know whether you know him or not , he was
County Supervisor at the time , and I was the
assistant •••• I went over ther e originall y in
the fall of 1947, just as they had finished up
harvest; and I had to write all the loans for
the following year of ' 48, and that was almost
superstitious . I wrote l oans for the next
year , and it was a difficulty communicating • ••�������
for me to communicate with them . And I had
started out from the first that they weren ' t
using enough fertilizer for the cotton. I was
agricultural , and we got to step up t hat ferti ­lizer;
and I'd have some of them that I ' d get
to talking to , "I want you to doubl e your
fertilizer" , and I ' d argue ' til I was bl ue in
the fact. And finally some of them would just
throw their hands up and say , "Well , if you' re
crazy enough to loan me the money , Lord , I
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ought to be crazy enough to use it . 1I And
I got a number of them to come over. Al l
woul dn ' t change . And finally I just had t o
go on and loan them money for thr ee hundred
pounds of fertilizer when I knew they ought
to use six hundred to the acre . And, woul d
you believe , 1948 cotton made l ike pears .
It made in the road. I f a stalk of cotton
came up in the r oad , it made cotton .
And they thought you wer e magic?
That ' s Cl int O. Pet tway we were looking at .
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They didn ' t have any limitation on acres �������������•• on
cotton acres then . No allotment . And I made
him pl ow a whole field down there , about
nineteen acres , in cotton . Had to hire help , to
chop it and hoe it , because there wasn ' t anybody
but he and his wife . But I recognized be was
8 blamed good farmer . So I said , "Clint ,
let ' s go all out , that whole field in cotton . "
Wel l , I made him use six hundred pounds of
fertilizer . He was the one that told me , "If
you ' re crazy enough to loan me the money, I
ought to be crazy enough to use it . II And that
cotton field , cotton got about this high , and
he made nearly' a bale and a half to the acre .
And he said, 'Lord done sent us a lord It, or
something like that , talking about me, just
l ike I brought that good cotton year . They
made cotton running out their ears .
One of them wrote us one day and said, "Dear
Mr . Lee Carl" . I never will forget it . Oh ,
it just carri ed on about ••• she said , "If we
had done what you said allover the years ,
Gee ' s Bend would be a well place today . "
Wel l , I was lucky in that respect . From then
on , I was accepted .
You got off to a good start , didn ' t you?
Up to that point, I wasn't accepted. Another
thing I bad a difficul ty . Back in those days ,
everybody in the state office would push us . On
those farm ownership type loans , they had a
unique feature in their notes for those farms .
See , the payments weren ' t but a hundred and
twenty something dollar s a year , principal
and interest , a year . Forty year notes , you
know .
For the house and far m?
Yeah , the whole deal. Like a $2BOO . OO total
l oan , and that woul dn ' t even buy the •••• You see ,
they or iginally buil t them a dwelling, a little
thr ee bedroom, all of them three bedr oom, and
some of them a little lar ger than the others .
They expanded the bedr ooms out so they could get
mo r e beds i n them , because they had bigger
families . But the aver age loan was $2BOO . OO .
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Well , they had this unique feature in the
notes where if they had a good crop year, they
could pay ahead on the note . No other lending
agency had such a feature . They could pay
ahead in a good year, and if 8 bad year came
along , we could forgive them annual payments t
on the farm loan. They could just ride, in
other words .
Well , I talked 'til I was blue in the face
about paying ahead, trying to explain what
it meant to them . I said , "You've seen good
years and bad years . II "Yss , suh. " I said,
ItWell , that's all this is. If you 'll pay,
like two payments."
W.ll , in '48 I tri.d to g.t th.m to pay four
or five , ' cause they was running out their
.ars with cotton like $200.00 a bal. , and
they was making twice or three times as much
8S they ever made in their life; and, oh , they
just couldn I t accept it . Said, IIThat t s just
like throwing money down in the road." I even
had on. that I •••• h. thought I got mad with
him , and he came in and all he was going to pay
was one payment . He had more money and I knew
he was going to blow it, end up next spring , see,
broke; and I acted like I really got mad . I
did get out of sorta but I wasn l t particularly
mad. And that son-of- a- gun , he must have had
a thousand dollars in his pocket , and came in
here and paid $123 . 00 and some cents l ike on
his land, and walked out , saying "That I saIl
11m going to pay." Well , he left , and he got
to thinking about it , I know , that I done
made Mr . Lee mad , and that son- of- a- gun came
back and.:i paid like four or five hundred more
dollars in one whack again . The s ame day.
W.ll , I hop. h. l iv.d to .njoy it .
He did . Later, the ones that ever got ahead •••
Well , I had one over there that used to tell
me incessantly , tlLord, I didn lt know what you
was talking about when you come over here , but
I sho' found out ." H. pai d, like $500 . 00 on.
year , which was about four payments for him.
And one year he came out and made about a bale
and a half of cotton . Couldn ' t pay what h.
borrowed for his fertilizer , and then he was
scared he was going to •••• he was conscientious
enough •••• that he was go ing to lose his place .
So he came to Camden one day to the county
office , when I was over across the river. He
came in there to Mr . Ivey and tal ked to him.
So Mr . Ivey was kinda short talking, and Mr .
Ivey kinda scared him . And he said Mr . Ivey
said ••• he told me later about it ••• Mr. Ivey
said , "Well, we been trying to tell you folks
you ought to pay ahead ll
, and all, you know.
Sharp talking. So finally Mr . Iv.y had .nough
for.thought to g.t up and go in the cl.rk ' s
office and pull the card on him . Didnlt know
how be stood . And he was telling me later about
it, said, tlMr. Ivey pulled that card out and
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looked at it and said, 'Hell, you don ' t have
to pay no more, you're in good shape '. Said,
' That ' s what Mr . LeCroy was trying to get you
to pay ahead on l. You caD go on . Don't worry
about your house payment •••• cal1ed them house
payments •••• don ' t worry about the house payments
no more. That 's what he got you paid ahead
for. t II Said, lilt began to come home to me
then what you was talking about . II Said, III
thought I done throwed money down the rat
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He had good insurance , didn ' t he? Had all
those houses like that been torn down when
you went down there?
Ob, yeah. But through the years some of them
built Borne little old shacks back for some of
the old ones. Particularly the old ones, the
old couples . Maybe sometime there wasn't but
one of them left , and somebody would help out
and build them a little old shack out there .
Oh , there 's one in here that I wanted to show
you, that's outstanding. There 's Mr. Cammack .
That's Mr. Cammack as a young man , now. But ,
see, the pure-bred bull? He was co-oped for
the purpose of improving the cattle on the
farm. They bought a registered bull, see.
Trying to breed up the cattle. There's the
pure-bred Poland China boar. During project
days they built •••• I know her, she's still
living. She 's old now, I don't know who she
was. But that was Clint o . Pettway's wife.
Clint O. died ••• Clint 0., let's see , what's
her name. But after Clint O. died , there was
another man over there named Goldsby Ross.
Let's see, what's her first name?
Mattie .
How ' d you know?
Well , I know Mattie Ross. I didn't recognize
her.
Well , Goldsby Ross, his wife died. And it was
the cutest thing . I was over there one day, busy,
writing up some paper work, and I got through
with somebody, and in walked Goldsby and Mattie ,
together. He was a widower and she was a widow.
So they announced, Goldsby did the talking; he
was a good fellow, he was a good farmer himself ,
and they came walking in and Goldsby done the
talking; and said he wanted to talk to me a
little bit. They came on in and shut the door
so nobody out side could hear them. So all
they wanted to ask , I thought at the time maybe
they wanted to know if I thought it was all
right for them to get married. And I said,
IIWby, sure , II but later I got to reflecting on
it and I said they probably was wanting my
per mission as much as anything .
'Cause they were that kind of people; they
wanted to be sure they did the right thing .
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So I encouraged them . I said, !lHeck , yeah ,
y ' 811 get married; both of you are good folks
and I think y 'a11 just be fine . Far as I'm
concerned, I think you ought to . II
See , be had gotten down and was right by
himself, and she never did have a child, but
all of bis children were grown and had left
home . And they did, and they moved and lived
in her house , though. They still living there.
Both of them are old.
Yes , I see them every now and then .
Ol d Mattie acts like she wants to hug me every
time she sees me on the street . Great Big
Clint was her first husband.
Was Mattie ' s first husband?
Yeah . But this is what the Farm Security found
them living in , these home made shacks. Those
are rived out shingles . They 'd get white oak
out of the swamp and rive out shingles . And
you 've saen this old building over there? Of
course, it ' s standing vacant now, it ' s going
down, but it ' s • • •• that ' s when they were putting
the roof on . It was a brand new six room school.
Well , the federal government built that school ;
bought the property and dividea it off the land
that they got . You know they bought three
plantations over there to build ••••
Now , they bought the VandeGraaff plantation?
VandeGraaff, the famous Bully VandeGraaff,
Tuscaloosa, the first All- American football
player Alabama ever bad. He had two brothers;
there were three of them ; Bully , Hargrove , and
I can ' t remember the other one .
William Travis was the other one, I think.
Well , the famil y went broke in depression
years and they had to sel l that l and . One
of them committed suicide , one of those
VandeGraaff boys committed suicide .
Hargrove? (Not correct)
Was it Hargrove? Well , some of those old ones
that I used to know knew all three of them .
And , by the way , when they got down where they
couldn ' t do anything , they had cattle in Gee ' s
Bend, and , of all things , they were the old,
original Red Devon cattle . D- e - v- o-n cattle .
It was a distinct breed . They were distinguished
as being about like wild buffalo . They could
make their own way , winter , summer and all ,
they 'd just eat anything, and • •• •
They 'd turn them loose down there?
Oh , they'd just rustle and get something to
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eat anyway. But they had distinctive horns
that would grow out , and when they got aged,
they ' d be come out and curved forward, an old
COW; and them things td be keen as needles,
the pOints of them . And some of them got to
be tremendous Size, and the VandeGraaffs just
let them go . Cattle was cheap, and they
couldn ' t even get anybody to try to get one
of them up _ And they •••• l had a Jeep over
there for a long time, and I bad some of
those folks over there , say, "If you'd been
here in that Jeep when we had those Red Devon
cattle roaming the old pasture the VandeGraaffs
had ••• if you bad driven out in that pasture
among a bunch of those Red Devon cows , they would
just attack that Jeep . That ' s how mean they
were . It And finally, the VandeGraaffs gave them
permission to shoot those cattle , one at a time .
(End Side 1 , Begin Side 2)
The rest of the herd would attack them, and
they ' d say they ' d shoot a cow down , and the
rest would run in and skin that thing right
quick and keep their eyes on the rest of them
(the cows) .
I have heard them talk about being chased by
Red Devil cows . Now , that ' s what they were
talking about?
They called them Red Devil , but it was D- . - v-o-n.
They were a distinct breed .
Well , they said they would chase them up a
tree , and one man down there told me about
spending the night up a tree .
If you started to walk across a pasture and one
of them would see you and come after you.
Mean, huh?
There ' s the school choir. Now , I used to have
meetings over there . An annual meeting, that 's
right there, and we ' d have a meeting in the
church . The church was located right out here
on this end of this building . The Ag building
was right there, and I don ' t know ••• never did
know what that was . That building wasn ' t there
when I got to Gee's Bend. But right here, at
the end of the school building, 8 ways out there,
was the church . It ' s now right up the road
above Mattie and Goldsby ' s house . They got
the mover from over yonder at Safford . Bozeman .
He came down there and he cut that church
exactly in half . Went from one side of it to
the other . Sawed the floors in a distinct
place. I watched him move it . I got over
there a lot. They started and sawed the
floor in two, the walls and the roof, then
they loaded up ODe half of it and went out
across the hills and hollows there with it,
dodging the power lines and the trees. Went
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over there and set it up , then come back and
got the other balf and pulled it in and placed
it just like a double- wide trailer . They
got them together , then patched it all the way
around. You can ' t •••• And I laughed and told
Borne of those folks, I said, "That building's
in better shape than it was over there . II
Because the dirt bad washed out from under the
pier, or something, and it was about to sink .
But they ' d bring the • ••• we'd have meetings
over there in church , and ��•••��
Now , did the gover nment build that church , too ,
at first?
Built the church, the Ag building, the whole
works . And , of cour se, later they come with
big block structure ~d they ••���• oh , and then
they deeded all this school property to the
County School Board , after they got it all
set up and gOing, they deeded that over some
years later. Of cours e , that was just showing
a ••••••
You don ' t know whose baby it is , though , do
you? Now, who took these pictures , do you
know?
I never did know that . I believe it was some­body
somewhat professional . It ' s too clear .
Well , they ' re forty something years old .
Yes , they ' re good pictures . And these little
Kodak pictures look like they were not taken
by the same one .
That principal ••••
Now , t 'hat ' s Street . No , Pierce .
Pierce . He ' s still living , I think . Pierce.
Teacher , gr oup of pupils . That ' s the original
schoolhouse that they had when Mr . Cammack and
all them went over there . Home made building,
just thrown up ther e . And they ' d also have '
church in it on Sunday .
So Mr . Julian Brown used to tell me about the
days when he worked in the old regional office
in Montgomery . Farm Security Regional office,
a five- state regional office. He was the real
estate director for the whole region . And
when they ' d set up one of these co- ops , he'd
have to go out and confer with the county
people and other people on the r egional office
staff , plus state staff . Red-headed man , still
l iving in Auburn, retired several year s ago ,
JUlian Brown . And Mr . Julian used to laugh and
tell me, he tol d me this tale several times,
that when they came to Gee 's Bend and got all
the nuts and bolts in place to Bet up this
pro ject over there , they came over there and
had all the heads of famil ies and their spouses ,
about a hundr ed of them , to meet in this chur ch .
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And be said he was the Master of Ceremonies .
Said, "I got up there and explained 88 clearly
as I knew how, thinking of the fact that most
of them were illiterate and suspicious of
outsider s. II They hadn ' t seen any white
people much , and a lot of children over there ,
sixteen or eighteen years old, never been
to Camden , even though there was a ferry .
They just didn't get to Camden . No cars. When
I got to Gee ' s Bend , there were two motor
vehicles over there ••• thr ee . The principal
of the school bad one; the Vocational Agricul­ture
, W. D. Brown , be bad one ; and the Co - op
store over there had a truck a small trUCk .
Those were the only motor vehicles over there.
None of the families had any kind of motorized
vehicles , not even a tractor .
Anyway, Mr . Brown said they had the meeting
over there , and he had this staff there with
him, with all the papers to si§n up for this
pr oject . Big project . Said, I explained it
all to them, asked for questions; some of them
asked some questions . When I quit getting
questions, I asked if any of them bad anything
to say , we 'd l ike to hear from you . Trying to
make it clear this is all open and above
board . II He said, IIIf there are no other
questions , we got some tables ••• II , think he
said they had some folding tables they had set
up around there , in front of the room , and some
cler ks , typists and all; and help f r om the
county office from over here was over there, to
sign them up . He said , IINow , men and women ,
get together in pairs , so you can go by and
sign at the same time . 1I
He said , uWhen they all got up, right in front
of me was one old man , " ••• and I think I figured
out who he was . It was an old man named Patrick
Bendolph , Sr . ' Cause I knew old man Patrick
quite well. He was a fine old man. He ' d go
barefooted all summer when he was eighty years
old, and plow a mule , barefooted, just like a
boy . He didn ' t ever wear any shoes , he told
me . But old man Patrick was quick to say
kinda what he thought , if you give bim a chance
to .
And he (Brown) said, "This old man just kept
sitting there right in front , in the' middle
of the bench, about two benches from the front II ,
and Mr . Brown said, IIEverytime I 'd move and
turn around, I ' d feel his eyes following me .
When I 'd move over the other way , I ' d feel his
eyes following me . Finally , to break the ice ,
I walked over and says , ' Ain ' t you going to
sign up? ' II And Mr. Brown said, "That man paid
me the best compliment I ever had anybody pay
me . I knew distinctly what he was talking
about . He told me , in about these wor ds :
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'Yas, sub, I believe I is goin' sign up ,
'cause you looks like 8 stationary gentle­man
to me'." Br. Brown said, in all his
days that was the best compliment he could
be paid . In other words, said, "You'll
stay hitched . "
That ' s right . I can depend on you .
You're not trying to feed me 8 line . And
he told me, "Don It ?t0u ever cross them up
on account of thst. I He waB State Director
then. But that 's where they met to set that
thing up.
NOw , there was 8 Mr. Hudgens ••••
Hudgens? He was out
I remember his Dame .
Regional Office .
of the Regional Office.
He was out of the
I wonder if he's still living?
12
Now, wait a minute. I believe by my day he
had gotten to the National office . Yeah , I
think be had. I remember hearing Mr. Hudgens .
He had a lot to do with the actual mechanics
and the building all the buildings . That was
a major accomplishment over there. They cut
the lumber ••••
Where did they cut all that lumber?
Over there. There was 10,243 acres of land
over there. Lot of timber . And they cut
timber there, as I understood it, and got it
sawed and dressed . I don 1t know where they
got all that done. I never dreamed of it .
But I remember seeing pictures in this book
of a shed ••••
Of a warehouse, uh, huh. Yes, looks like a
shed.
Warehouse. Well , they had all this lumber
stored, and as much as they could; but they
precut their lumber to build a house or a
barn, right there .
It was pre- fabricated housing, 'near about,
wasn 1t it? Almost .
See, once those carpenters were in , carpenter
foremen there , some of them looking for jobs
in the thirties , and they 1d give them a native
crew of men over there , and they 1d get things
set up and go out there and precut a whole
house; 1cause most of the houses were just
exactly the same size . And then they ' d haul
the house in pieces . They wouldn 1t be in
sections . And then they 1d throw it up, and
they'd build a house .
So , they 1d get a house, a new house; 8 barn;
smokehouse; chicken house; 8 well , a deep well;
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and 8 privy; with 8 hand pump, 8 heavy duty
hand pump. for about $1400.00 . And the
1 3
workers , they told me that during the depression
they'd get about fifty cents 8 day . Well,
that's about what I used to ge t after I'd
been to college . I ' d come home in the
summer, work on the farm , or do any work in
the county . Well , when I worked for the
county , county road or bridge gang , I'd get
a dollar 8 day for that . Wasn't any eight
hous day _ It was more like twelve or fourteen.
NOW , that land belonged to the VandeGrssffs
and who else?
The VandeGrasffs, Mr. White Smith , who became
a millionaire later, at Ja ckson , Alabama .
Yeah , lumber company. And his son died not
l ong ago , didn't he?
No , that was bis brother .
Was that his brother? Clarence was his brother?
Clarence was his brother . Clarence was the
last of the Smith brothers . Percy Smith was
one of his brother s, lived at Cannon Bend .
And Mr . Clarence , with Mr. White , as I under­stood
it, Clarence worked for Mr. White, and
Mr. White bought out Barrett- Holman Lumber
Company , right here in Camden , down here, and
set that up and Clarence ran it . And talk was
that it was assumed that Mr . White gave ClarenCe
this over here, just gave it to him . But Mr .
White Smith owned about 1500 acres over there in
a section of Gee's Bend we still call Whites .
I know where Whites is , and those folks know
where Whites is.
Yeah . they talk about it all the time. Whites
and Sodom .
Yeah , I know where Sodom is. And Long Bottom .
Long Bottom down there . There's an island
used to be right in the middle of the riVer.
We called that Buzzard's I s land . On the map
I think they show it as Hurricane Island.
And, of course, now with the dam , it ' s gone .
You don ' t even see Hurricane Island no more .
I know where it is if I get there .
But Mr. Clarence , he grew cotton over there
mostly with wage hands . And during his time,
he was a single man over there , by the way;
big old bachelor, wore about a fourteen or
sixteen shoe, or something. I saw him one
time in my life . He spoke to the Camden Ex­change
Club one night . Somebody invited him
over here , and that ' s the first and only time
I ever saw him to know him . And I met him
and got to talk to him just • little bit, and
told him I had been the Granddaddy of Gee ' s
Bend . He kinda perked up at that . Used to
tell Borne tales on some of those folks over
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there , said, "Mr. White didn't ask you to
do nothing on the farm that he couldn't do
twice as much as you could. 1I Said he was a
big man , Single and able bodied and touch .
He 'd get rough, you know .
Yeah , straighten folks out, could he?
14
Said he could cuss 8 blue streak. But, while
be was over there, he got some joker to come
in with 8 little peckerwood 5awmill • • that s
what they used to call them ••• set it up in 8
day and start cutting lumber the next day.
Come in and cut his own lumber and get wagons
and mules , and they 'd haul lumber across the
ferry down here to Ellis' Ferry into Camden.
Green lumber. And those folks, some of them
I used to know, that said, "I was one of his
lumber wagon drivers . " Said, "We'd make
two trips to Camden a day, if we started early
enough . And that was daylight. 11 Said, "Have
to go two wagons together. When we'd get to
the ferry , the wagon would go on the ferry . 1I
They 'd have to get one off on the other side •••
no , get the mules off on the other side.
Let's see •• they said they could get both
wagons and four mules on the ferry at one
time. And unhitch the mules . When they'd
get to the other side, tbeyl d have to hitch
all four mules to the wagon to get it up the
bank, then take all four down there and get
the other wagon , bring it up the bank, then
come into Camden .
No wonder it took all day.
Then, going back, they ld have to trot those
mules all the way, because Mr . White'd be
cussing them out if they didn't get on back.
So that ' s how he got in the sawmill business ,
right there , and from there he went to
Jackson , Alabama; sold out over there (Gee's
Bend) to the government and that got him his
start right there . He was a broke man. Just
an old bachelor man on his own . And the other
portion of Gee ls Bend, about two thousand
acres, belonged to the Spurlin family. And,
as I understood it , I didn rt know Mr . Spurlin,
but I knew Mrs. Spurlin ; I knew John Spurl in
and I knew Leon Spurlin , last son . He died
about a year ago up here in the Red and White
Grocery Store . He fell dead . But , 8S I under­stood
it, Mr. Spurlin ran also an advancing
business r ight here i n Camden . So , he had 8
bunch of famil ies .
(Some workers are preparing to leave the office
and her e follows a general discussion of what
time they come to work and when they leave.)
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Oh, I wanted to show you one other thing.
I know who this is . Now, this woman is
still living. There's Edgar Mooney over
there, and that's his wife and a bunch of ••••
Dew, wait a minute. I got this wrong. That's
not Edgar's wife. That's Cherokee Coleman,
she is now, but when this picture was made,
she was Cherokee Pettway. And that is one
of her boys. What's his name? Been grown
years and years; and I'm sure that daughter
and that daughter married in Gee's Bend . They
still live there. I don't know what became
of the others. But this boy, he got a farm.
I made him 8 loan to buy one of the farms
over there. He's no boy no more . Oh, what
is his name?
Well, I did want to •••• what's this? Old china
closet, to take in their new home. Quilt.
This is quilting. Now , this was the Home
Supervisor, that woman in white. I don't
know who she was talking to. I might have
known her one time, but I don 't know. I
don't recall them, but that's s omething about
this garden. They pushed gardening over there,
you know, and all ••••• Oh, they had these
canning plants . You ever hear anything about
the canning plants?
Yes, I 've heard them talk about the canning
plants .
They had canning plants on a co-op basis and
made share of using them. That's old man Roman
Pettway, Sr. He was a stalwart man over there.
He always had money. I never had to loan him
any money. He had money.
Now, how did he manage to have money? Was he
thrifty?
He was smarter than the rest of them. He was
thrifty, yeah . He raised children enough
that he could make a lot of cotton.
Let's see, there was one picture I wanted
to show you . I don't know which book it's
in.
You got any idea who that one is?
I believe that's Jacob Bendoff's wife, but
I'm not sure. I don't recall her name, but
I worked for the Health Department and I know
she was on their list with TB. She had TB
for years.
Look at that whole sack of flour. Twenty­four
pound sack of flour, and sugar, too, I
think. Oh, this is the gin platform. This
is the old gin platform. That's where they
rolled the bales out on it, and if they wanted
to load them in trucks, then all they had to
do was tumble them .
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Well, the gin, while William Collins up here
was the store manager; and, undoubtedly, he
was the best one we ever had . I mean he ran
it on a strict basis. The Supervisor was
al ways fussing at the Manager about letting
too much goods out on credit. And the Manager
previous to him got to where he bad like a
seven thousand dollar credit limitation, by
regulation of the state Director. That previous
manager, he'd have 8 run of eleven or twelve
thousand dollars, and couldn't get it ••••
You may have known him, Dr . Paul Jones . Well ,
there he is in the old clinic . They had a
clinic building over there right by the scbool.
It looks like a dwelling . That building ' s
still standing.
Got some lattice on it?
Yeah . That building" still standing. Well,
that's the building they used for, I think,
8 once- a - week clinic. And Dr . Paul was over
her e and used to tell me about going over
there to Gee ' s Bend, and he loved it. He
really did. Somebody'd get him , if he didn ' t
have a way; if they didn't have a ferry where
he could drive over on the ferry and go on
over there - meet him at the river . He was
a relatively young man .
Wonder what happened to his records? I bet
he kept records of Gee's Bend.
I don't know. He used to ask me a lot of
questions about it .
Now, this man here, that's Stokes Haynes.
I remember Stokes. He was the supervisor, the
man supervisor , under Mr . Cammack, and he
lived at Annie Manie . Stokes Haynes,
H- a - y- n-e-s, Haynes . That ' s the old house.
And I know who he is, that was Little Pettway.
Now, he was the head man over there?
He was the head honcho . I cleared everything
with Littl e. And once I got Little in my
confidence, where I could talk to him and
make them think I wasn't trying to crook
them, Little and I got along real well.
He was a ginner, too. He ' d put on his metal
rim glasses and go to work at the gin; keep
metiCUl ous gin records. And I got to talking
to him , though, after some years ; got to
talking to him one day and he was looking at
a paper; and I realized all at once Little
was having to put that paper right up here .
I sayd, IILittle , take your glasses off and
let me look at your eyes. II He took his
glasses off, and I could just see ••• what do
you call them? •• cataracts, in both eyes.
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I said, "You ever had anybody tell you you
had anything wrong with your eyes?" He said,
"Naw , sir . I ain't never been to 8 doctor . II
I said, "Well, I got reason to believe you
got cataracts . Would you go to an eye doctor
if I can get you some help?" He said, "Yaa,
suh. I feel like I ' , 'bout to go blind . I
don ' t know wbether rIm going to be able to keep
the gin records another year. II
So , I got hold of the Vocational Rehabilitation
repre s entative and told him what I had over
there. Anyway, we got him to , I think it was
Dr . Callaway, in Selma; and I was anxious to see
how that thing worked out, and I knew the day
be was supposed to go . I got a copy of the
l etter notifying him to go . And I went over
there to see him. Got over there and he was
sitting on the porch with a patch over one
eye . And he hadn't been but a day before yes­terday
•••���
He 'd had that surgery, huh?
So I said "Little, ain ' t you been in the
hospi tal? r, He said , "Naw , suh , lain' t been
in the hospital . " I said, "Well, did he operate
on your eye?" He said , "Yes, suh~ he operated
on it." I said, "Where were you?' He said,
I'Sitting up in a chair. " And it must have
been the simplest type of cataract, because I
know there a r e different degrees of cataracts .
And he had a patch on it .
I said, "When you got to go back?" Said, "Next
week , same day next week . Next week goin ' to
take this patch off, and if that eye'. all
right , then he goin ' to fix up my other eye ."
And he did . Two weeks in a row he removed
cataracts from both eyes , sitting up in a
chair, and let him come home the same day .
And you know , once his eyes got well , he just
cleared up and could see all right, just like
he always did .
And I know he was always grateful to you .
He said, "That sho was a blessing . 11
Now , this was a
D- i - c- k- s - o-n •
• • • • • • • • • •
character. That ' s Dr. Dickson .
I believe bis wife'S still
(End Side 2 , Tape 1)
(Begin Side 1, Tape 2)
That Dr . Dickson was 8 pistol ball. He was
tough talking, but a good country doctor. Dr.
Paul was a good country doctor.
And he's just pouring ether on a cloth there and
just ••••••••
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Just on 8 cloth the r e over the face , and put
that ether; that ' s the way they used to do it .
or course , i n a hospital , they had a mask.
Now, that was the first Ag teacher over there .
Do you know what his name was?
w. D. Brown ••• He was the teacher before W. D.
W. D. came following him, and I used to know
what his name was . Brown was already there.
Dillard. They called W. D. Dillard Brown .
He ' s got a littl e store over ther e .
Brown ' s One Stop .
He r etired - when? Last year? As Vocational
teacher at Wilcox County High . They had an
NYA pr ogr am over there years ago . That ' s
Nat ional YOQth Administration , under Roosevelt,
you know .
Now , that looks like a horse collar .
That ' s a corn shuck horse collar and a rug
thing , a pad, a mat made out of corn shucks .
Now they ' re too proud to do any of that .
That ' s one of the modern cook stoves they
bought them , and they ' d loan them operating
type money to get that.
Her e's the school building , modern school , you
know; got panelling on it . Now , here ' s the
clinic. Community Center Clinic . Each
Thu r sday all examinations given , diseases
diagnosed by a licensed physician. Now , that
was Dr . Paul , but Dr . Dickson did some work
down there. He just drove straight down
through the woods , about eighteen mil es down
there to Gee ' s Bend .
I reckon this is that work shop . There's one
of the old canning plants . Screened all the
way around , and they got a brick, f urnace like
thing, like the old fUrnaces used to be, with
a chimney . Well , it sticks up over there some­where.
And , then, on that they had, I believe ,
a metal coverj I remember seeing them . They
had a heavy metal cover over there , and they
could set these giant pressure canners up there.
Those giant ones, not like those little home
canners like this. They had some giant ones .
They could put, I reckon , forty - eight jars at
a time in them . Set them up there and screw
those l i ds down on them . And one of those
darn things over there , there was a woman,
and I 'm sure she's still living , Spurlin
Pettway ' s wife • •••
Indiana .
Yeah , you know her? You notice around her
face?
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Yes , I had noticed.
I got to talking with her. I didn ' t know all
this , snd I got to talking to her about doing
Borne canning one time , just casual , you know .
"I ain I t gain I use none of them things . II
I said , "How come?" She said, "Don't you see
where I been burned? One of them things blew
up on me . II I found out, some of the rest of
them told me, they made 8 mistake and didn't
get the s8al around it, or something; anyway,
they didn ' t get the thing down good .
And it blew up , and that ' s where she got those
scars?
Th a t ' s where she got the scars . I still want
to find that picture .
Here 's 8 history from Virginia . University of
Vi r gin ia .
Yeah .
Now , that was in the New York Times.
I ought to know who that was. Didn ' t s eem
like he left many years after I got her e . I
remember ho~ he could talk . He ~as a Sight,
grinning all the time he ~as talking . This
is the old big house.
The old Pett~ay house , ~asn't it?
It ~as setting up on the hill .
Is that what they call Sendy Hill?
It's right ~here Clay Pett~ay 's ~ido~ lives,
Leah Pettway. And she married Bir den O.
Pett~ay l ater , and she had to come over here
and see me, to see if I thought it was all
right . I had been a~ay f r om the government
a l ong time . Leah come to see me to see if
I thought it was all r ight for her to ma r ry
Birden.
But there ' s a story about that house . Now ,
I never got this from Mr . Cammack . I got
it from some of the people over there. And
right out across the road from this ~as ~h e r e
they h ad that warehouse , and there ' s a ne~
brick home built there, ~it h a chain l i nk
fence around it . Got to be somebody ' s school
teacher , or something . I inspect the sept ic
tank when they put in a septic tank .
But any~ay, that house was sitting right
across the road from there , and the l ast
person to live in that house was a white
man who worked for the VandeGraaffs. He ~8S
kind of their overs eer . He lived alone and
had no family, but he sold produce out of
there , you know, like stor e goods ; and it
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was his enterprise, too. That wasn't
VandeGrasffs , that was his deal. And in
that house, up in the hallway, somewhere
through the hallway up there, it looked
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kinde like a dog trot through that house;
looked like i t might have gone through there,
but, on the other hand, it might have gone
right across this way . Under that, inside
that porch in that incline in that hallway,
was 8 big old iron 88fe, just like they used
to have down at the store. And that old man
used it as a kind of water shelf, to set 8
bucket of water up there with his wash pan,
in the old days. And that old man died and
was buried somewhere , I don lt know. Well,
that house stood vacant for some time, and
that old safe still sitting up there, locked,
and nobody throught any thing about it.
Well , finally, there came a day when Geels Bend
started developing over there , and Mr . Cammack
was the head man . He was down around the
store ares, that general area where the post­office
is now, one day; and I had a man , he's
still living, Sam Irby ; he ' s known over there
as Nonnie . I hear Sam ' s getting right old ,
I don ' t know if his mind ' s too good yet . But
Sam told me this story and others verified it .
He was working in a crew Mr . Cammack sent up
there with a white boss from Tuscaloosa - he
said all they knew was that man said he lived
in Tuscaloosa - to tear down this old house ,
and later they built a house right in that
ar ea for John Henry and Gertrude Miller . They
been dead and gone some years now. And Clay
inherited their ~roperty by will . That old
couple told me , tHow can •••• we ain ' t got no
chillun, and we know we both gettin ' old, how
can we leave this property to Clay?!! I said,
"Why you want to leave it to Clay?" Said ,
!t ' Cause he the only one over here pay any
attention to us. " Well , Clay, he was renting ,
I had helped him rent their land ••••
Clay Pet tway?
Clay Pettway . He was Leah's first husband.
They had eighteen children, by the way, and
raised nearly all of them . Some of them died
in infanc y, they used to tell me. But , Clay
had been good to them . He had a pickup truck,
and he ' d go get that old couple when they wanted
to come to Camden and go to the health depart­ment,
or the bank, buy groceries . He ' d see
after them . Well , it was just an act of kind­ness.
He wasn ' t any kin to them. And some
years went by and they sent for me . I didn ' t
have any business with them , so I went by there
to s ee what they wanted. All they wanted to
know was how can they leave all they own to
Clay , at the de ath of the last one of them .
And I said, "Well , the only way to do that
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right, you got to go to a lawyer's office,
and don't put it off. Go on to the lawyer's
office and tell that lawyer what you telling
me. And, basically, what you want to do is
leave a will. That lawyer might decide you
might want to fix up a deed with a clause in it
to give you the right to live on it the rest of
your natural life. He might deed it to him
here and now. But reserve the right to live on
it the rest of your life , whichever is best,
and he can advise with you . fI
They came over here later right away, the next
week or so, and came to Joe Robins Bonner.
Joe Robins and Jean, his wife, were good friends
of mine and my wife, and so they hadn ' t been
over here but a day or 80, and we were together
one night and Jean and Joe Robins said , lIWe had
a customer from over at Gee 's Bend fl , and told
us about this old couple coming over and they
f ixed them up a will. Well, anyway, that
house was there, John Henry Miller 's house,
and Clay later moved when they started building
the dam. He ~hought the river was going to back
up and cover his house . That's the funniest
thing. He done paid Bozeman up yonder a
thousand dollars to come down here and move
his house up there by John Henry's house ,
right at the end of it, just separated a little
bit. I said, flClay, you crazy, that river
won It cover you. fI He said, "Hit done got up
that high, another rain and hit's gonna get up
on the house." One thing, that got him away
from down there and gave him a little more
privacy.
Well, what did they do with that old safe in
there?
Oh, oh. When Mr . Cammack sent that crew with
that supervisor up there, to tear that old
house down, said they went in there and they
took the roof off of it, tearing the walls down,
bringing the old house down. Don't know what
they did with the lumber. Just hauled it off
or used it for framing, or something. That
old safe was there, and said that white man
boss from Tuscaloosa , thet is all they knew,
he was from Tuscaloosa, down there working
for overseer 's wages, had a sixteen pound
sledge hammer , and he told some of the men
there, IIGo get that sledge hammer and bring
it around." So they brought that sledge hammer
around and he said, "Now, go to work on that
safe right there. fI So they started pounding
on that old safe right where he told them,
and he said, "Just keep beating. tI
Well, finally, they beat in the door. They
beat a hole in that door, where he could open
that door, and he did; and Sam Irby always
swore to me that when he opened that door on
that safe, the greenbacks just poured out on
the floor. He said, "green money". Paper
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money just poured out on the floor. And said
as that man began to gather, he gathered up
all that money and put it in a shoe box, Sam
told me , and his car was parked out there,
and he went out there and unlocked the trunk
of his car and put that shoebox down in that
car .
And in the meantime, somebody done come along
and saw what wes going on and went on down the
road and told Mr. Cammack . Said, "That maD
up yonder done broke open that old safe in
that old house and found 8 bunch of money in
it; and be done put it in his car. II Said Mr .
Cammack came up there and Sam , he said , "I
thought Mr . Cammack and that man, one of them,
going to kill the other one about that . II And
that man never did give in to Mr . Cammack,
and Mr . Cammack was telling him that was govern­ment
property. "You're violating the law,
you can't do it. II He said, IIGovernment property ,
hell, that's mine. Finders keepers . I got
what I found in that safe and it ain't none
of your business . II And that night, when
quitting time came, that man left and never
did come back to Gee ' s Bend no more . And I
never got a chance to ask Mr. Cammack about that,
but that's what Sam told me .
And I believe he ' d tell you the truth, don't
you?
I thought he was at the time. And later, I
asked Borne of the rest of them what they knew
about it , and they said they always heard that
man did open the safe and found a bunch of
folding money, and they thought it belonged
to that last old white man that lived in that
house , and sold goods across the counter, and
supposed to have been working for VandeGraaff .
He l ived to be an old man, and they didn' t
doubt it, because they said he never went any­where
to spend any money. Said he lived hard .
I did want to show you an old house. There's
one of them big canners they used in a canning
plant. Well, I guess that's probabl y in a
canning plant, I don't know. But that's the
kind they had , the huge canners there. This
is one of the old houses; rived out shingles.
Well, that's board, that t s not logs. Shell
these penders - peanuts . Now , I used to know
what that old couple was.
Now, they grew a lot of peanuts down there,
too, didn 't they?
Yeah . Well, they, in fact, tried to grow
peanuts for sale as a cash crop_
I l ike that picture .
Yeah , how 'bout that? Now, I used to know
who that was, but I can 't remember. That's
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half a barrel; they sawed a barrel half in
two and made a tub out of it. Now, there ' s
Edgar Mooney and his wife ••• I can't remember
what her name was •••• but both of them are
still living. Edgar Mooney ••••
Didn't he run the ferry?
Yeah, he used to be the ferryman. Edgar ' s still
living. He 's getting quite old, and he 's
feeble and sickly. Been sickl y for years.
No meat on his bones. But his mind might be
all right. Might be clear .
That 's a typical house. See there , that's
probably no doubt the original main house.
This is improvement , two rooms and a runway.
In other words , they needed more room because
they got more children and need more room , so
instead of adding on the original house, they
move out here and leave a dogtrot , or runway,
be t ween and added another room out here with
a chimney, where they could heat it . You
know, they never join two rooms right straight
together; you know that is bad luck in itself.
They had that belief. That ' s probably some
African belief .
I wonder how they got them to move in those
new houses where all the rooms touched?
That ' s a stick and dirt -chimney, what they
used to call it . They got clay, mixed salt
with it, and straw. My daddy used to tell
me sometimes if they could get enough horse
hair or hog hair. Hog hair was more plentiful .
When they killed hogs, they'd scrape the hair
off . You ' d accumulate the hog hair and put
it in with that red clay mud, with salt; that
salt would make it hard and get a glossy
finish where it wouldn't soak water, and then
the hair would hold it together . But they
could use straw, just old straw of any kind,
wheat straw , whatever you got . Now, bere's
your dog trot, with a prop on the shutters,
see there. Crude construction, logs and
shingles. That's what they l ived in . Look
there, air just pour through there. They
probably never had bad colds ' til they got
in that tight house . Chimneys only a mass of
mud and clay, but they could burn a fire in
there and get by with it , if they didn ' t
get the fire too high .
There they are . Some did
That ' s the shed up there .
in there .
frame
They
work only_
had saws and
Now, was that near •��•• where was that shed?
That was immediately across the road from
that old big house we were talking about .
See , there they are, building a barn . They
set cedar posts - they got cedar right off
all
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that plantation back out in that prslr18
north of this store here - in that limestone
section. And they put those cedar posts
five feet in the ground, tamp them and then
build a frame around them. And some of those
barns are still sitting right there on those
cedar posts.
Now, somebody told me they built the barn
before they did the house.
Now, here's the warehouse shed, with a water
tank. This is the headquarters of all that
construction. See, here ' s the rack for your
lumber.
I do wonder where that lumber was cut and
hauled away from.
See, there's one fitting joints for window
framing, right there . I know who that was
with that pipe. That wes Nelson Pettway .
Nelson was probably one of the better car­penters
over there . I know who that was .
I knew him before he died years ago. His
name was Joe M. Pettway. And that looks like
Clement Pettway, Cherokee ' s husband. She
had all them children by him . Without shoes,
there rs old Joe working without his shoes .
I feel certain that's Clement. Clement was
a good man and he hurt his knee and he got a
stiff leg. Had to walk on a stiff l eg.
Couldn rt bend his knee at all. And I knew
Cl ement quite well and Clement and Cherokee
were good folks , they just didnrt have any­thing
. Had a house full of younguns, and he
wasn rt able to do much plowing at all . What
they did, they did the best they could, I
always thought . And he had trouble with that
knee, and I got to talking to him about it
and asked him when did this all start . He
sai d he hit it with a hammer one time . The
hammer slipped; he was hitting something
and the hammer slipped off and hit him in the
knee, and he said it liked to kill him at the
time .
Then later I talked to ' Dr . Dickson about it.
I said, "Dr . Dickson , you ever doctor on
Clement Pettway?" Said, "Yeah. II I said,
IIDid you ever have any dealings with him
after be hurt his knee? He tol d me a hammer
hit him." Said, "Yeah, that rs right." I said,
"What happened to him that made his knee
stiff?" Said, "He r s got TB of the bone and
his knee is locked up . II Calcium deposit got
in the knee joint snd just locked it up .
See, there they are , finishing it up, you
know . And here rs Stokes Haynes. He ' s the man
Mr . Csmmack bad over there . Wel l, there ' s
the building over ther e at the school that
was the clinic buil ding . That ' s one of the
dwellings there, adding on the porch. They
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haven't put the rafters on the porch.
Now , was Stokes Haynes a bricklayer , too?
I don't know. All I knew was be was a farm
supervisor. There's one of the original
houses. An old ox . That 's what somebody
was plowing with over there . And there's one
living over there right now, Israel o. Pett­way.
Used to laugb and tell me, says, IIBefors
the project days, the old Rehabilitation
Program made me plow an ox for two years,
and I lost enough religion during that two
years to make up for all the rest of my life
before and after. II
Small boy from a family. That looks like
Cherokee. That's her boys. They had a dis­tinctive
look about them . And I believe that
one is living right next house up the road,
going out of Ge e 's Bend, from Gol dsby Ross
and Mattie 's. He 's on the right and his house
is setting kinda cockeyed to the road.
Yes , I know how it looks.
That's where I remember he lived, if I ain't
got it mixed up with somebody else. Now ,
that's a familiar face, but I can't remember
who she was. That ' s the way they cooked,
though. Majority of them cooked on the fi r e ­place
prior to p ro ject days. Meat and bread
and boil some collards. Potlikker. They'd
make potlikker with greens .
That's Dr . Dickson, I thought that was going
to be •••• and there's his nurse, real nurse.
Regular pr oject nurse . He's removing tonsils
there. I imagine that's what be's up to.
I bet they never lost a patient .
I don't imagine they did.
And that's Mr. Cammack .
There's Mr. Cammack, down there in some of
that corn. That corn was growing , they used
to tell me that was corn in St. John, they
called it, over in Long Bottom , before the
dam ever came. There was a section over
there where the land just fell off down in
a kind of a deep draw, gentle like; and then
went up to the river bank, and all that dirt
in there ••• What happened, when the river would
flood , the river would cut across there. It'd
get up high enough and come right off of
Hurricane or Buzzard Island, as we called it,
and Hurricane Island right up at the upper end,
and that river water cut across there and
sweep around through there, but wouldn ' t erode
this land. It put deposits in it. And I often
thought that that dirt there, you could cut
down ten feet deep and still find that same
loamy sand. And it would have a lot of humus in
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26
it , and if I ever saw a place in Alabama
make two hundred bushels of corn to the acre ,
under the right conditions , it would be right
there in what they used to call st . John.
Of course , it's covered up with water now .
But Mr . Cammack used to talk to -me about
St . John land, how it would gr ow corn . Look
how higb the ears are . Well , that's what
he's feeling for , an ear, right there .
Ther e ' s Dr . Dickson and the nurse ; tonsils
removed; school library.
Now , who are these , right here? You're one
of them?
Yeah, I 'm one of them . Now , that's Nettles
Ivey r ight there . Nettles Ivey was County
Supervisor and I was the Assistant at the
time . If I r emember cor rectly who these were,
that man there was with the Department of
Agr icultur e of Is r ael .
He was visiting over here?
He was visiting . We had visitors all the time .
And this man was from •• • • they came through
Washington first . This man , as I recall, was
f r om •••• what country was he from? He looks
sort of •••• Phil lipines . He ' s a Phillipine,
and he was with the Department of Agriculture
of the Phil lipine gover nment.
I don ' t know what these other pictures are .
These ar e some recent pictures we made of
Gee ' s Bend. That shows the school , and all
these things up ther e . There ' s the clinic
building . I don't know what that is , looks
like some of them down there taking noon in
the shade. Forty- five ears on the stalk .
Prolific corn .
Now , who is that Mr . Mr. Cammack , do you know?
No , I never did • • • l can't recognize who that
is. That looks a little l ike Little's shape ,
ther e; but I 'm not sure . See , they ' re stand­ing
up i n a wagon. That ' s how Mr . Cammack
got down there . See that mud on the wheel?
That ' s how he got down there , to keep from
getting his shoes muddy . There ' s Mr . Cammack
again . That ' s sugar cane .
Was that POJ?
I imagine so . POJ. That ' s the award they had
in that dwelling over there , of that clinic
building. There's big Clint O. Pettway . He
was a huge man. Ther e was an old man lived
over there i n Gee's Bend, named Ottaway
Pet tway . Did you ever hear of him?
I ' ve seen his name.
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Uncle Ottaway . I called him Uncle Ottaway
to them . Uncle Ottaway lived to be , by my
calculation, best as I could calculate it
for his boys , that he was one hundred and
t wo and over when he died, and the summer
befor e he died, he picked cotton , I know.
I'm sure he chopped and hoed cotton , but he
was out picking cotton that fall , and it
was spring sometime when he died.
But Clint 0 , was one of eight boys that that
old man had . Living now is Israel Pettway,
Israel 0 . , and they called him Sharper .
That ' s his nickname , Sharper . So you might
ask some of them about Sharper. And be t s got
a brother Darned Ed O. Ed O. ' s still living.
Any more l iving now? Ther e was eight origi­nally.
There was Cl int 0., Tom 0. , Ed 0.,
•••• Mr . Cammack , by the way , had 8 tradition
when he went over there . None of them had
middle named, and the government had a place
on all their forms for 8 middle initial .
So he gave them all an .,O"?
He gave •••• no, he gave this family 110" . He
used a rule that was very simple . He used
for a middle initial the first initial of
their father . Ottawar, was their Daddy's
name , so they used 110 1 for the middle initial .
It was as simple as that . So, there were
eight boys , and, as far as I know, only one
girl , and I saw her last week . I went over
there to check Day Care Centers, and at one
of the Day Care Centers this womaD told me,
said, lIyou know Arie ' s oldest daughter is here
from New York, and she told me two or three
times she sho would like to see Mr . Lee .
Said she ain ' t seen you since she left home . II
And she was a teeD age girl when she left
home .
So I said, "She down there at Arie's house?"
Arie ' s house was across the road and down a
little side r oad up there , and I said, "Ain ' t
Arie disabled?1I Said, IIYeah, you know she
was in a car wreck and broke her leg , and
' sides that sbe broke her arm , left arm and
right leg somehow. 11 Broke her arm first.
Said , "Sbe's been in a wheelchair , but she
can move around a little now . II So I said ,
"Well , I 'll go see both of them . II
I went over there and that woman, that daughter
of hers , she ' S forty something years old, got
two great big boys, and she works for the
postal department in New York state, maybe
New York City, she told me . And that woman
hugged my neck. And said, "Mr . Lee , I know
you done seen • • • • " this woman ' s name up
there . I said, "Yeah, she told me you was
home and I can remember when you and your two
sisters were just like little door steps . You
was the tallest, and the next one that high,
and down like that . II
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And she acted like she was truly glad to
see me, and old Arie has always been. And
sbe's the only sister to these IIO"S. She
was Ottaway's only daughter. Ei ght boys and
one g irl.
And it was unique how I figured up for Herman .
There was one named HermaD O. Ottaway was
'way up in years. He said, "Us 'd like to know
how old Papa is." I said, "You got any way
to figure it?1I He said, III thought of some­thing
. Mama always told us she was eighteen
years younger than Papa, and she died Buch­and-
such 8 year , and she was so old when she
died. II So I went from there. I got to calcu­lating
. At eighteen years, she was so old
when she died; and eighteen years difference
in their age, that made him sO 'old when sbe
died; and I figured how many years she ld been
dead, and it came out to one hundred and two.
Well, he didn l t live but a few months after
that . And a funny thing , he used to come
over here, and right across the street from
my house is the McNeil house - I donlt know
whether you remember Earl McNeil, Merle and
Laura Dale McNeil - used to work for the Board
of Education •••••••
(End Side 1, Begin Side 2 , Tape 2)
When he was ninety something, he'd come over
there every winter and work in their yard for
them, just utterly clean it, and he'd spend a
week over in Camden . Held come across the
river in a skiff and walk into Camden. Get
over there and they ld have the tools, and he 'd
work around their yard . Feed him dinner.
He ' d stay around Camden somewhere. He had
somebody close kin. And that was their Daddy.
And he was still dOing that, I know, when he
was ninety-five, because I looked out of my
house one Saturday afternoon, and he was
working in the McNeil yard. It was cold that
day , it was a cold wind blowing, and I thought
about I had a military officer l s topcoat, and
never did like the thin g . Felt like it was
too short for me, or something. And that thing
was just hanging in a closet, and I'd had it
for all that time, and it was a good coat, and
I went in there and I thought to myself, I
bet that coat will fit old man Ottaway. He
was a little shorter than I was and I bet it'd
be just r ight for him.
I went in my ,closet, I didn't even tell my wife,
I just went and got that thing and carried it
over there, and I said, "0ttaway , turn around
here and try this coat on . II Put it on him,
and it was just right. He told everybody he
could ever see , IIMr. Lee gave me this coat . 11
And, by the way, when •••• naw, it wasn't him •• ••
yeah, it was. You know that picture we had
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over here in the front , of the man from Israel
and ODe from the Phillipines? There ~8S 8
man with them that took that picture, and he
was from out of Washington state; and while
we was traveling around that day , he said ,
"LeCroy , I'd like to talk to the oldest per son
in Gee ' s Bend that can tell me somethin~ about
the history of this country over there. He
was from Tennessee , originally , or the south ,
you know , and knew something about these folks.
So I said, ~ I got your maD , but you ' re going
to have to let me help you keep him straight .
His mind wanders some . He caD tell you.
Probably talk about things that happened eighty
years ago better thaD he can about what happen­ed
yesterday . II
We went down to old man Ottaway ' s house and we
talked to him a little while, and he talked to
him and asked him questions about the old
ginn ing days . That was one distinctive thing
that stuck out . Ottaway could remember just
as well when he used to work at the old
fashioned gin , where they 'd pack the cotton
in the press wi th their feet . Then , finally,
they ' d get enough in there and they ' d get to
bagging and ran the ties up there in place .
And then they ' d have a big old screw they 'd
have to work . The screw was on top , and they
had a mul e to pull that, like a syrup mill,
pull that screw down on top of that bale,
to scr ew it down tight enough; and it was still
bigger bales in those days than now . And
that ' s how the gin packed cotton , get it in
the bag and tie it .
So, when we got through , that man had a good
camera , he said , "You reckon I could get Uncle
Ottaway ' s picture?" I said, "Yeah . But I
won ' t ask him to go down the steps . 1I So we
got the old man , and I helped him , he was just
in his r egular old clothes , you know , like he
wore , patches on them . He was worried about
he wasn ' t dr essed up . I said, "We don ' t care
if you' re dr es sed up , Ot t away, I ain ' t never
seen you dressed up in my l i fe . We want a
picture of you just l ike it is . II And took
h i m out on the end of the porch wher e he would
stand in the sun, and that man got on the ground
and took the picture of him up on that porch.
And from Washington , D. C. , he sent that
picture back to me . It was jus t as clear
as it could be. So I put it in my bag to
carry to Ottaway. I carried it over there
one day , and by that time he was bedridden.
He took th at pictur e up and held it up , and
he star ted giggling , and said , "That ' s the
first picture that ' s ever been made of me in
my life . " Now , he I s one hundred and two
years ol d . I said , "Ottawa1t, somet i me some­body
snapped a picture . It 'Naw , s uh , this the
first pictur e ever been made . That ' s sho me . "
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And you kno~, after be d i ed, I wen t down to
Ed O.' s house and went in his house , looked
up on the mantel piece and ther e was an
eight by ten enl argement of that , in a f r ame ,
of old man Ottaway . He was al ready dead and
gone by then . Up on the mantel piece was
that picture , and I l ooked up there and said ,
IlUh , huh , there ' s your daddy ' s picture . II
He said , !lYse , and you got it taken and give
him that picture that I got it made from . II
And he said , "All us chillun got on e made
f r om i t . "
Now , aren ' t you glad they did that?
Yeah , I was tickl ed to death . And old Ed
just kinde started shedding tears 8 l ittle bit
and said , "You know , we finally got Papa last
year to join the chur ch , when be was over 8
hundred 7.8ars old . He got r eligion befor e
he died . I
Now, that ' s hog k i l l i ng .
You know who those are?
That ' s Roman Pettway , Sr . There ' s Roman , Jr.,
lives in Gee ' s Bend . That ' s Roman , Sr. , right
ther e . And I declare I don ' t know who that is
behind the hogs , ther e . But that ' s ol d man
Roman .
Now , he was a leader down ther e , too, wasn' t
he?
Oh , yeah . I tell you how Roman used to make
money . He r an a sho r t loan business over ther e .
Ver y quiet .
He was a pr eacher , too , wasn ' t he?
He was a pr eacher, Rev . Roman , yeah . But in
my deal i ngs wi th him , he was utterly f a ir .
Somewhat stand- off ish from me , and I had an
idea he was f rom Mr. Cammack. Somebody said he
and Mr. Cammack used to •• • • had times ••• ••
Littl e odds , huh?
Yeah , didn' t agree
what independent .
I'm sure they were
over ther e .
on things, but he was some­I
don ' t know who tha t i s .
dead and gone bef ore I go t
And t hat ' s Van Pettway , they said .
Oh , that ' s little
yeah . I knew Van
him to Tuskegee .
You did?
Van , without
quite well.
the l egs .
In f a ct, I
Yeah,
got
And talked ' til I was blue i n t he face trying
to get his daddy and mama - his daddy was
Van, Sr . - he went for pr eacher , too . Good
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old man, very superstitious, and I talked
and talked and talked about getting the Cripple
Children's Service to get him to Tuskegee ,
and go to Andrews Clinic.
Now , was he born that way?
Born with Ma-deformed legs .
Just little nubs?
I don 't know what they looked like. And the
way he walked was, originally, he had two big
tomato cans that be 'd lace his arms on, and he ' d
scoot along the ground. But later somebody,
I don't know who, took some hardwood and made
him some pretty little pedestal like things,
with a rubber sale on the bottom, made out of
8 piece of tire rubber, I reckon, so he wouldn't
slip on anything slick; and, boy, he CQuid scoot
along the floor on those things . Well , little
Van got s ome education .
But , anyway, getting back to the Tuskegee deal,
I talk.d to th.m finally •••• th. Cripple Children
people told me that it was probable that some
expert doctors could consider making ••• removing
the little old mal- d.form.d l.gs and forming
stumps, and from that give h im legs and let him
go through enough physical therapy , and he ' d
learn to walk. So I talked to little Van , and
I said , uWouldn't you like to stand up and
walk like a man?" "Yas, suh." And, of course,
he was a minor, and be had to have his parents '
consent, so I ' d go talk to old man Van and his
wife, Mary. That was his first wife. He ' s got
a living wife, a s econd wife. And •••• he ' s got
a living widow, the man's dead •••• and little
Van's dead.
And so I'd go talk to them and they wouldn't
consent, but, finally, in due time, they did
con sen t for him to go to Tuskegee . And he got
up there to Andrews' Clinic , and something
happened. He came home after a week or so , and
he didn't even want to talk about it. I couldn't
get anything out of Little Van .
NOW , about how old was he?
Oh , fourteen, fifteen , something . Sixteen
was the cut -off date for the crippled children,
or something. But I couldn't get any sense
out of little Van , and finally I got to talk
to the Crippled Children woman and she had
gotten the facts.
Little Van was up there in Andrews' Clinic, and
the doctors and nurses come around every day
and they examined them stumps and all; and one
morning they made a terrible mistake, she fo und
out . They walked right outside his door , with
the door standing slightly open, and him in
there in the room, in t he bed, I reckon; the
clothes in the closet. They got right outside
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the door and stood and had 8 conference,
and they begaD to talk about, "Well, if we
cut here and cut there and cut ••• 11 They
used the word "eut", and little Van, he
got out of the bed, or wherever he was, and
he got his clothes and got them on and scooted
out of that room and was down the highway,
headed to Gee's Bend all the way from Tuskegee ,
when some of the hospital personnel caught him,
found him.
And he put his foot down , what little foot be
had, and he was going home; and they had to
send him home, and he never did get the opera­tion.
But he grew up grown, and married, and even
got a car with special controls and learned to
drive it. And be got up • • •• I don't know how
old Little Van was when be died. Folks told
me a peculiar tale. He got to preaching; and
he used to sing for us . Had a bass voice when
he got full grown; he had a deep bass voice .
I'm a bass, so I'd get over there a few times
and get him over there at the school where they
had church, had a piano, and I ' d work with him
on the bass, you know, how to carry bass, really
carry it; and he'd pick it up and always act
like he appreCiated it. But he got to be a
preacher, too. But there came a year when
he told •• •• those folks swear that Little Van
told them one year, "I won't live out this
year", and didn't. He died . Died , apparently,
of natural causes. Just died.
That's a barn; lot . Drinking water from a
spring . A lot of that went on before the
government got in there .
There's your canning plant .
many were over there . I got
the home supervisor, though .
I don ' t know how
an idea that's
Pressure cooker. Now , that looks like a home
size canner. They had some of those giant
ones . I saw some of them around. Been down
to the spring . Meals . Cooking in the fire ­place.
Oh, that looks like Edgar Mooney's
wife there. Sho looks like her. I don't
remember who she is.
Look at the old fashioned shoes. Look at that
cook stove, there.
They just put the stove pipe up the chimney,
didn't they?
Setting up in
the chimney.
ramp.
the fireplace, with the
That's a bale of cotton
pipe up
on that
Now, these picket fences around there, that
was a little unusual, wasn ' t it?
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Yeah , but that used to be standard procedure,
to rive out those pickets from even pine logs .
Get the str aight, the long , straight pine . It
would split 8asy . And ther e was a cer tain time
of the year it would split easier . My daddy
knew when pine would split easy . I don ' t know
whether it was when the sap was down in the
winter time, or up in the Bummer. It would
split Basier.
Now , is that 8 martin house up there?
Yeah , bluebird, martin . They put it up for
martins, ' cause they didn't grow any gourds,
I reckon . That's your old canning center.
Four. They had four of them over there . It
tells you there . I was thinking it was five
or six .
There ' s one of the brand new barns, see there?
Did they build the barns before they did the
houses? Somebody told me about that .
They might have , I don't know . See , they ' d have
8 different crew building the house from building
t he barn . There used to be a man with Farm
Security, and then Farmers Home , Dick Bedding­field.
Mr. Dick went up pretty high . He was a
District Supervisor with Vocational Agriculture
at one time . Anyway, Mr . Dick told me this
funny tale . He came down to go to Gee ' s Bend
one time, in the construction end of it , and
he drove up to a house under construction; had
the roof on it and the walls , the outside walls ,
about completed , finishing the inside . He
called on one of the Pettways there , he couldn ' t
remember which one, but he knew he WBS a Pett­way
, standing there, and he said, "You remember
those Pettways never would crack a smile?1I
I said, IITh at ' s right . EspeCially if you was
a stranger, they wouldn ' t joke , had no sense of
humor. If it was a white man ' s joke •• • • flat .
They didn ' t get the pOint . " I learned, don ' t
tell them a white man ' s joke, because they ' d
take it dead seriously . You ' d give them the
punch line , and they ' d think, what did he do
that for? So, anyway , he said this man Pettway ,
he caught on he was going to live in this house .
So he said, "I thought I ' d strike a conversa­tion
. " I said" "I understand this is gOing to
be your house . I Said, "Yas , SUh . 1I His shaCk
was right there , the log house was right
there beside him . Building a new house right
by it. He said, "It ' s gOing to be a nice house,
guess you ' ll like it . You ought to like it."
And he said, "Naw , suh, I don't like it . "
Just like that . He said , "How come you don ' t
like it?" He says , IIToo little , ain ' t big
enough . 'I He said , "What do you mean , it ain't
big enough? It ' s got three bedrooms in it. 1I
Said, "It still ain' t big enough . " He said ,
"How many chillun you got? How big a family
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you got?" Said, "I got a wife and six kids . II
And he said, "My Lord, you can get ••• you
ought to be able to get in that . 11 He said,
"Well, the trouble is , my oldest girl and my
wife both is looking up now."
That ' s the way Mr. Dick told it, and he said,
t'Last year my wife had twins. II He said he could
imagine that this man was figuring his wife
had twins last year, now she's going to have
twins again, and the daughter will, too; and
thet 1s going to be four more mouths to feed.
And be said there were some little cut off
pieces of board on the floor, the ground there,
and he picked them up , two of them . Said be
knew he wouldn't know what he was talking about
if I said liS double decker bed" or lI s tacked
bedell, he wouldn't know wbat he meant because
he'd never seen them. He said, "I tell you
what you're going to have to do . You 're going
to have to fix you up some beds for them kids
where you 'll have one bed up there and one bed
down here; one bed above the other and they
won't take up as much room . One kid up there
and one kid down there." Said he looked at
that a little bit and he says, "Cap, it won't
work . 'I He said, "Why won It it work?" Said ,
"It won' t take up as much room as beds or
ftallets, either." He said, "It won't work."
'Why won't it work?" He said, "'Cause that
one up there on the top gain' to wet on that
one on the bottom." Mr . Dick said, "I left
there thinking he'd sleep them on a pallet,
and when they'd wake up in the morning, all
over the house , the whole pallet was wet."
But Mr . Dick was a piatol ball .
You know, I told you while ago that was the
school and church, and they bad church in it.
I was wrong . This was the original school
building over there. That's right. It was a
separate building. That was the school building
where one hundred and eight students received
their training in the three R' s. You know,
they didn't get much school. That old man
there must have been dead when I got to
Gee's Bend, but there's his ox with •��• what'd
I tell you his name was? •• Haynes , Stokes
Haynes .
Is that Stokes Haynes?
Ub, huh . Plowing an old ox . There was an old
man named Collins Pettway . And a peculiar thing
is Collins ••• and that son is dead now, Collins
had a son that they all said it was his son ,
but he was red beaded.
I ' ve seen albino twins over there.
But be had red, distinctive kinky red hair.
But bis son ' s dead now . He died a few years
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ago and he was relatively young when he died .
I don't • • • oh, he died building Jones Bluff Dam .
He worked on the construction of Miller ' s
Ferry .
That looks like a real brick ~ i mney there, too.
Those fishing poles were cut in the swamp,
weren't they?
Yeah , cut in the swamp . Cane break .
There were two different spellings of Bendorfs.
There was 8 Patrick Bendorf, Sr. , and Patrick
Bendo!f, Jr. Both had farms and both already
dead. Old man Patrick was a real old character .
He was a good old man . He raised a bunch of
grandchildren . When I ' d go over there , he'd
have about twelve kids in his house , and they
was grandchildren or great grandchildren. He 's
going on 8S big an operation as any of them
over there , and him an old man . Still plowing .
He could out- ploW them . But he had enough
grandchildren over there he didn ' t have to, but
he ' d get in there and pitch . But they spelled
their name B- e - n- d- o- f - f. But there was another
set over there and they spelled theirs
B- e-n-d- o- l - p- h , like I think it's truly
supposed to be . Well , Jacob wasn ' t ••• • if he
was related to Patrick and old man Patrick and
young Patrick , I don ' t know; but there was a
dist inct difference in spelling . I never did
learn why the difference , ' cause they couldn ' t
tell me .
I r emember when I first started going to Gee ' s
Bend, there was an old man over there , that
they used to tell me was a blacksmith, who used
to sharpen plows . He ' s sharpening a sweep
right there. There ' s his forge , heat it over
there and then sharpen it while it was hot .
And this old man, they told me at one time he
had a blacksmi th shop, and at one time had a
little farm over there ; but he and his wife
got old and they gave it up. And the government
took it in the government inventory, or maybe
they never did sell it to him. He had a
pro ject house . But it was standing vacant
when I got there , and I got busy and later sold
it . And I can ' t remember his name . He was a
Pettway . But he had something wrong around
his nose here, and I always wondered kind of
what it was. And I was always running up on
Dr. Paul Jones, and he td tell me some crazy
tal e , and he told me about this man , i f it ' s
the one . He said it was the blacksmith; he
said some of thos e Pettways got hol d of him
to come over there, they needed to see him •• •••
No , they brought him in to his office, which
was down her e then . Said they brought that man
in there and said, "Something wrong with his
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nose. II And says, "I ��ot him in there and
started examining him I, and he said, lIyou
won't believe what 1'm going to tell you
I found wrong with him. He had screw worms. 1I
You know they attack cattle wounds, and all .
He said, "I finally p icked it out of him, that
he went to sleep on the porch one day, and
his nose had been bleeding . 1I That nose bleed
was the key to the whole thing, because those
screw worm flies were attracted to blood. And
from that he developed screw worm up in his nose.
And he said, "That I s one time when an MD got
hold of a vet. II He said, III called Shine
Hollinger (Camden Vet) in on that deal . II And
somehow or other, they couldn't just treat it
wi th ordinary dressing that they used to kill
screw worms. They had to use something to
make them come out, fly out, get out of his
head. They had gone up in his nasal passages .
Why, they would have killed h im, wouldn't they?
But he said , "We saved that old man. Saved
him. II He was getting up in years then. He
slept out on the porch in the hot summertime.
Got out there 'cause it was too hot in the
house. And I'm inclined to believe this was
him , only I knew him when he was an old man .
But he had quit blacksmithing.
Now, this is Clement. That was Clemen t .
He had tuberculosis, it says .
He had, and I wasn't aware of the TB of the
lungs, but Dr. Dickson said he had TB of t he
bone, in that stiff leg . Here's Edgar Mooney .
That's his crib, in a wet barn .
That old man, that man was William Benning .
His wife, I think, is still living down in
Whites , back off to the left. You have to
drive down that hill on a gravel road. You get
down ther e and the first ~oad just past Rosa
Kennedy ' s house, turn left, and it's Benning
property . Now , his farm is one unit. Wasn 't
split up like the rest of them. Those are
dug wells. They were dug, and I don't imagine
there was any curbing below the ground .
Were you down there when Miss Lula Palmer was
down there? Lula Palmer, from Montgomery?
No , I never did know her. I've heard that name.
Well , I think she opened the nursery school.
She had probably gone by the time you were
down there .
I'm sure she was there before I was. There's
one of those new pumps, new wells, with a
concrete slab around i t. Those things lasted
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for years, but Boston Kennedy told me that
some of them still worked up until not too
many years ago. Oh, Bnd they took the old
hand pump out and put an electric pump in
there. They had plenty of water, the well
did, and Boston Kennedy," .he and his brother,
Johnny, would fix wells, put in and install
electric pumps and fix them. Of course,
they got city water now, ftublic water. But
Boston told me, he said, 'You know, those
cast iron casings that went deep in the ground,
just finally rusted out. 1I And that was forty
something years they lasted. I was surprised;
they had enough iron, 11m sure, in the water.
That's Houston Kennedy. He's a young man,
there. Houston, I used to laugh, Houston's
wife, they lived across the creek. You found
out where across the creek is? Go right
along in front of where the old store used
to stand, follow the black top 'til you get
down there when the end of the black top is.
Turn hard left and get back on dirt them .
You go down, go on over the hill, go 'cross
a wooden bridge •• ••• •
(End Side 2 , Tape 2)

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Holding.Institution

Birmingham Public Library (Alabama)

Full Text

"
1
Interview with Braxton LeCroy
Date of Interview : September )0, 1980; Camden , Alabama
Interviewer : Kathryn TUcker Windham
Transcriber : Edna O. Meek
Begin Side 1, Tape 1
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(Note: Mr . LeCroy and the interviewer are
looking at a collection of old photographs
(unidentified and undated) made at Gee's
Bend . )
Cammack was with Farm Security for ten years
over there .
All right , now ••••
He lived his life over there .
His ful l name was Mr • • • •• ?
William A. Cammack . W. A. Cammack.
And be came out of Cl arke County , didn ' t he?
Well , you might recall that there was a Mr .
Cammack who was head of the Vocational Educa­tion
Department , High School Education Depart­ment
of the State of Alabama. R. E. Cammack.
He was Dr . Cammack. Well , that was his brother .
So , anyway , Mr •••• before all this policy came
down from Washington , Mr . Cammack tried to run
it as he pleased ; and he was paternal and they
had to account to him for everything , and even
to the point ••• they didn't have any l aw enforce­ment
over there ; the law didn ' t even know they
existed, har dl y ; but they ' d work out their own
difficulties.
In Mr. Cammack's day , if somebody over there
caused trouble , like one br oke in the co- op
store over there , he was telling me about that,
and he was known as a trouble making young man
anyway; and when he broke in the store some of
them caught him . They knew it was him , and Mr .
Cammack got up the facts , and when he did, he
sent for the boy and his daddy , apd when they came
over there, Mr. Cammack told him , IIWe want you
to get out of Gee ' s Bend and we don ' t ever want
to see your face back her e no more . 11 And years
later , after I got over there , one of them told
me , said, l1you remember that boy Mr. Cammack
told to get out of Gee's Bend and don't ever
come back? 11 I said, "Yeah , I remember hearing
the story." He said , "Well , they fixing to
bring him back in a box. II I said, IIWbat
happened?" Sai d , IIHe was in some joint down in
Mobile , where he was living , drunk one night ,
Saturday night or something . The owner cal led
the pol ice , and when the pol icemen went in
there , he advanced on those two policemen with
a long bladed knife in his hand . They shot him
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down like be was a dog . 1I
Oh , what you need to know about this?
All right, when did you go down there?
Oh, I came to Wilcox County originally in
first of July; officially, the first of July,
1946. Mr. Cammack was still here , and I
handled all other real estate loans for us in
Wilcox County, other than Gae l s Bend . It was
real estate that year . They had liquidated
the old project , divided up all the land into
small farms , small farm units, and turned
around and liquidated the project ••• they
called it project liquidation ••• • and whatever
they bad paid into the • ••• on the account for
their homes , see , they bad a lease and purchase
contract during the project, a forty year deal.
They were l eaSing farm land but buying their
home . That ' s the purchase end of it . So over
about seven or eight years , they accumulated
a littl e equity in their homes . So somebody
had to calculate how much equity they had
created in that purchase account . So I used
to see those old project liquidation papers in
the file ; how much equity they had created,
and they ' d give them credit on that against the
purchase of the entire farm then. Then it
became straight out- and- out farm ownership
loans. Those would be family- size farms in that
day and time .
Why did they liquidate that project?
Because Congress ordered them to, allover
the United States . In most of them , they just
come in there cold blooded and that ' s every
one of them I ever heard of . There was a big
one up in Jackson County , near Scottsboro,
all white people . And they even built a
cotton mill for those folks up t here , give
them all farm wor k , and it all f l opped . They
didn 't anybody ••• the folks wouldn't cooperat e .
But they were a differ ent kind of people .
These over here were used to a white landlord ,
super vising them , advancing them in some manner;
might have even helped them get advances in
Camden , so they were used to that idea of
having an overlord, so to speak . And Mr.
Cammack was a good one . He was a good ol d man.
Lots of folks might not have liked him , but
I was crazy about him . I knew be was dedicated
to what he was trying to do.
After be l eft here, be worked for a time in
Choctaw County . He was getting up in years.
And even after he retired and went back to
Grove Hill, where they were or iginally f r om ,
he'd come up here occasionally and spend a
long week end . Come up like Friday and all of
his free time he could , he ' d go to Gee's Bend
and just knock around over there with those
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folks, and I might not even see him . Later
they 'd tell me , "Mr . Cammack was over here,
3
Saturday, all day." He t d run up on me some-where
, start reminiscing and ask me about
80- and-so. Say, "Whatever became of him?U
Well , he was there when the project started,
then?
Yes, he was sent there . He was originally the
County Agent in Wilcox County, for about ten
years prior to that time . Then , when this
thing came along, he switched over and went
to work for Farm Security , as Project Manager .
That ' s what they called him , Project Manager .
And how much staff did he have?
I know at one time he had one assistant man , a
man assistant, Assistant County Supervisor, that
worked strictly over there for him; and one
Home Supervisor, who was a Home Ec graduate and
worked with the home end of it, with the women .
And that was, of course , just f rom scratch over
there working with those folks , with their
peculiar ideas . Like I said , as I told you
last night , I should have written a history .
They had a lot of African beliefs over there .
went all the way back .
Like what?
Oh , you know , superstitions. I can't remember
any particular ones , you see ; I never did make
a note of them. Of course , my mother and daddy ,
they were from the old school, and they had a lot
of old original superstitions; like , you know ,
to get rid of war t s, rub it wi th •• what is it? .
a spider web ; and then put the spider webs up
under the door steps . Seemed kind of stupid
to us children. We'd make fun of Mama about
it , and Boon as I got big enough, I learned to
quit making fun of Mama . She didn ' t have any
education , and Papa didn ' t either. What they
had was very short lived. Summertime education .
That's all they got back in the old days . See ,
my Father was born in 1871, and his Daddy hadn't
been long out of the Civil War when he was born .
Well , my Father was born in '69 , and mine went
to school three months all together , in his
whole l ife .
Well, they had a lot of those old African ••• I
wish I could remember some of them that they
were telling me about . And I wouldn ' t fight
them on it , you know, argue with them . Let
them believe it , if that 's what they wanted
to believe . And the majority of them were
i lliterate. Lot of them signed by mark, you
know . I never did do any of them like I heard
one somebody did . Went by ODe of them's house
and had a paper he wanted to get signed. Of
course , he signed by mark, so his wife said,
"He ' s gone off over the hill over there
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somewher e, but he's supposed to be coming
back in a little bit." So he just, they
told it on him, he stuck a pen up in the
ground in the front yard, and said, "When
he gets back , tell him to touch this pen,
I gatta go down to so-and-so ' s house , and
when I come back I'll get the pen and sign
his name for him." I didn ' t do quite that
bad. I let them know what they wer e signing,
whether they knew what I meant or not. But ,
everything ' s co- op . This is a pure bred boar.
These two hogs are pure bred, because all they
had was maybe r un down hogs, and they ' d try to
build up the qualit y of the livestock by getting
pure bred boars and pure bred bul ls .
Now , did the co-op , the store down there, continue
to operate after the project was liquidat ed?
Oh, yes. We had a store and gin, and a grist
mil l , combination . The store was one opera­tion
and the gin was another . And, as I recall
the figures on it, they origi nally borrowed
$20 , 000.00 from the government on co- op funds ,
to build the building , bui ld the gin , and I
don't know how they did it on $20,000.00. And
maybe a $1. 00 membership . Each one of them pay
a doll ar membership for each family , that
wouldn ' t have been but about $100 . 00 . A dollar
membership . But that was in the late thirties
when everything was cheap .
So they put up a one- stand gin down there with
a diesel engine that was big enough to pull .
I always laugh about that huge diesel engine
they had to pull that gin . Then they put a
gr ist mill out there , too . Grist mil l was on a
little wing shed, I remember, on the back of
the gin house , and, you know Mr . William Coll ins ,
up here at the Red and White (Grocery store in
Camden)? He was the manager for the stor e and
gin and all that complex; it was quite a complex
operation. It was over a hundred thousand
dol lar a year business . And the old manager
had l eft the business, and Mr . Nettles Ivey , I
don ' t know whether you know him or not , he was
County Supervisor at the time , and I was the
assistant •••• I went over ther e originall y in
the fall of 1947, just as they had finished up
harvest; and I had to write all the loans for
the following year of ' 48, and that was almost
superstitious . I wrote l oans for the next
year , and it was a difficulty communicating • ••�������
for me to communicate with them . And I had
started out from the first that they weren ' t
using enough fertilizer for the cotton. I was
agricultural , and we got to step up t hat ferti ­lizer;
and I'd have some of them that I ' d get
to talking to , "I want you to doubl e your
fertilizer" , and I ' d argue ' til I was bl ue in
the fact. And finally some of them would just
throw their hands up and say , "Well , if you' re
crazy enough to loan me the money , Lord , I
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ought to be crazy enough to use it . 1I And
I got a number of them to come over. Al l
woul dn ' t change . And finally I just had t o
go on and loan them money for thr ee hundred
pounds of fertilizer when I knew they ought
to use six hundred to the acre . And, woul d
you believe , 1948 cotton made l ike pears .
It made in the road. I f a stalk of cotton
came up in the r oad , it made cotton .
And they thought you wer e magic?
That ' s Cl int O. Pet tway we were looking at .
5
They didn ' t have any limitation on acres �������������•• on
cotton acres then . No allotment . And I made
him pl ow a whole field down there , about
nineteen acres , in cotton . Had to hire help , to
chop it and hoe it , because there wasn ' t anybody
but he and his wife . But I recognized be was
8 blamed good farmer . So I said , "Clint ,
let ' s go all out , that whole field in cotton . "
Wel l , I made him use six hundred pounds of
fertilizer . He was the one that told me , "If
you ' re crazy enough to loan me the money, I
ought to be crazy enough to use it . II And that
cotton field , cotton got about this high , and
he made nearly' a bale and a half to the acre .
And he said, 'Lord done sent us a lord It, or
something like that , talking about me, just
l ike I brought that good cotton year . They
made cotton running out their ears .
One of them wrote us one day and said, "Dear
Mr . Lee Carl" . I never will forget it . Oh ,
it just carri ed on about ••• she said , "If we
had done what you said allover the years ,
Gee ' s Bend would be a well place today . "
Wel l , I was lucky in that respect . From then
on , I was accepted .
You got off to a good start , didn ' t you?
Up to that point, I wasn't accepted. Another
thing I bad a difficul ty . Back in those days ,
everybody in the state office would push us . On
those farm ownership type loans , they had a
unique feature in their notes for those farms .
See , the payments weren ' t but a hundred and
twenty something dollar s a year , principal
and interest , a year . Forty year notes , you
know .
For the house and far m?
Yeah , the whole deal. Like a $2BOO . OO total
l oan , and that woul dn ' t even buy the •••• You see ,
they or iginally buil t them a dwelling, a little
thr ee bedroom, all of them three bedr oom, and
some of them a little lar ger than the others .
They expanded the bedr ooms out so they could get
mo r e beds i n them , because they had bigger
families . But the aver age loan was $2BOO . OO .
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Well , they had this unique feature in the
notes where if they had a good crop year, they
could pay ahead on the note . No other lending
agency had such a feature . They could pay
ahead in a good year, and if 8 bad year came
along , we could forgive them annual payments t
on the farm loan. They could just ride, in
other words .
Well , I talked 'til I was blue in the face
about paying ahead, trying to explain what
it meant to them . I said , "You've seen good
years and bad years . II "Yss , suh. " I said,
ItWell , that's all this is. If you 'll pay,
like two payments."
W.ll , in '48 I tri.d to g.t th.m to pay four
or five , ' cause they was running out their
.ars with cotton like $200.00 a bal. , and
they was making twice or three times as much
8S they ever made in their life; and, oh , they
just couldn I t accept it . Said, IIThat t s just
like throwing money down in the road." I even
had on. that I •••• h. thought I got mad with
him , and he came in and all he was going to pay
was one payment . He had more money and I knew
he was going to blow it, end up next spring , see,
broke; and I acted like I really got mad . I
did get out of sorta but I wasn l t particularly
mad. And that son-of- a- gun , he must have had
a thousand dollars in his pocket , and came in
here and paid $123 . 00 and some cents l ike on
his land, and walked out , saying "That I saIl
11m going to pay." Well , he left , and he got
to thinking about it , I know , that I done
made Mr . Lee mad , and that son- of- a- gun came
back and.:i paid like four or five hundred more
dollars in one whack again . The s ame day.
W.ll , I hop. h. l iv.d to .njoy it .
He did . Later, the ones that ever got ahead •••
Well , I had one over there that used to tell
me incessantly , tlLord, I didn lt know what you
was talking about when you come over here , but
I sho' found out ." H. pai d, like $500 . 00 on.
year , which was about four payments for him.
And one year he came out and made about a bale
and a half of cotton . Couldn ' t pay what h.
borrowed for his fertilizer , and then he was
scared he was going to •••• he was conscientious
enough •••• that he was go ing to lose his place .
So he came to Camden one day to the county
office , when I was over across the river. He
came in there to Mr . Ivey and tal ked to him.
So Mr . Ivey was kinda short talking, and Mr .
Ivey kinda scared him . And he said Mr . Ivey
said ••• he told me later about it ••• Mr. Ivey
said , "Well, we been trying to tell you folks
you ought to pay ahead ll
, and all, you know.
Sharp talking. So finally Mr . Iv.y had .nough
for.thought to g.t up and go in the cl.rk ' s
office and pull the card on him . Didnlt know
how be stood . And he was telling me later about
it, said, tlMr. Ivey pulled that card out and
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looked at it and said, 'Hell, you don ' t have
to pay no more, you're in good shape '. Said,
' That ' s what Mr . LeCroy was trying to get you
to pay ahead on l. You caD go on . Don't worry
about your house payment •••• cal1ed them house
payments •••• don ' t worry about the house payments
no more. That 's what he got you paid ahead
for. t II Said, lilt began to come home to me
then what you was talking about . II Said, III
thought I done throwed money down the rat
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He had good insurance , didn ' t he? Had all
those houses like that been torn down when
you went down there?
Ob, yeah. But through the years some of them
built Borne little old shacks back for some of
the old ones. Particularly the old ones, the
old couples . Maybe sometime there wasn't but
one of them left , and somebody would help out
and build them a little old shack out there .
Oh , there 's one in here that I wanted to show
you, that's outstanding. There 's Mr. Cammack .
That's Mr. Cammack as a young man , now. But ,
see, the pure-bred bull? He was co-oped for
the purpose of improving the cattle on the
farm. They bought a registered bull, see.
Trying to breed up the cattle. There's the
pure-bred Poland China boar. During project
days they built •••• I know her, she's still
living. She 's old now, I don't know who she
was. But that was Clint o . Pettway's wife.
Clint O. died ••• Clint 0., let's see , what's
her name. But after Clint O. died , there was
another man over there named Goldsby Ross.
Let's see, what's her first name?
Mattie .
How ' d you know?
Well , I know Mattie Ross. I didn't recognize
her.
Well , Goldsby Ross, his wife died. And it was
the cutest thing . I was over there one day, busy,
writing up some paper work, and I got through
with somebody, and in walked Goldsby and Mattie ,
together. He was a widower and she was a widow.
So they announced, Goldsby did the talking; he
was a good fellow, he was a good farmer himself ,
and they came walking in and Goldsby done the
talking; and said he wanted to talk to me a
little bit. They came on in and shut the door
so nobody out side could hear them. So all
they wanted to ask , I thought at the time maybe
they wanted to know if I thought it was all
right for them to get married. And I said,
IIWby, sure , II but later I got to reflecting on
it and I said they probably was wanting my
per mission as much as anything .
'Cause they were that kind of people; they
wanted to be sure they did the right thing .
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So I encouraged them . I said, !lHeck , yeah ,
y ' 811 get married; both of you are good folks
and I think y 'a11 just be fine . Far as I'm
concerned, I think you ought to . II
See , be had gotten down and was right by
himself, and she never did have a child, but
all of bis children were grown and had left
home . And they did, and they moved and lived
in her house , though. They still living there.
Both of them are old.
Yes , I see them every now and then .
Ol d Mattie acts like she wants to hug me every
time she sees me on the street . Great Big
Clint was her first husband.
Was Mattie ' s first husband?
Yeah . But this is what the Farm Security found
them living in , these home made shacks. Those
are rived out shingles . They 'd get white oak
out of the swamp and rive out shingles . And
you 've saen this old building over there? Of
course, it ' s standing vacant now, it ' s going
down, but it ' s • • •• that ' s when they were putting
the roof on . It was a brand new six room school.
Well , the federal government built that school ;
bought the property and dividea it off the land
that they got . You know they bought three
plantations over there to build ••••
Now , they bought the VandeGraaff plantation?
VandeGraaff, the famous Bully VandeGraaff,
Tuscaloosa, the first All- American football
player Alabama ever bad. He had two brothers;
there were three of them ; Bully , Hargrove , and
I can ' t remember the other one .
William Travis was the other one, I think.
Well , the famil y went broke in depression
years and they had to sel l that l and . One
of them committed suicide , one of those
VandeGraaff boys committed suicide .
Hargrove? (Not correct)
Was it Hargrove? Well , some of those old ones
that I used to know knew all three of them .
And , by the way , when they got down where they
couldn ' t do anything , they had cattle in Gee ' s
Bend, and , of all things , they were the old,
original Red Devon cattle . D- e - v- o-n cattle .
It was a distinct breed . They were distinguished
as being about like wild buffalo . They could
make their own way , winter , summer and all ,
they 'd just eat anything, and • •• •
They 'd turn them loose down there?
Oh , they'd just rustle and get something to
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eat anyway. But they had distinctive horns
that would grow out , and when they got aged,
they ' d be come out and curved forward, an old
COW; and them things td be keen as needles,
the pOints of them . And some of them got to
be tremendous Size, and the VandeGraaffs just
let them go . Cattle was cheap, and they
couldn ' t even get anybody to try to get one
of them up _ And they •••• l had a Jeep over
there for a long time, and I bad some of
those folks over there , say, "If you'd been
here in that Jeep when we had those Red Devon
cattle roaming the old pasture the VandeGraaffs
had ••• if you bad driven out in that pasture
among a bunch of those Red Devon cows , they would
just attack that Jeep . That ' s how mean they
were . It And finally, the VandeGraaffs gave them
permission to shoot those cattle , one at a time .
(End Side 1 , Begin Side 2)
The rest of the herd would attack them, and
they ' d say they ' d shoot a cow down , and the
rest would run in and skin that thing right
quick and keep their eyes on the rest of them
(the cows) .
I have heard them talk about being chased by
Red Devil cows . Now , that ' s what they were
talking about?
They called them Red Devil , but it was D- . - v-o-n.
They were a distinct breed .
Well , they said they would chase them up a
tree , and one man down there told me about
spending the night up a tree .
If you started to walk across a pasture and one
of them would see you and come after you.
Mean, huh?
There ' s the school choir. Now , I used to have
meetings over there . An annual meeting, that 's
right there, and we ' d have a meeting in the
church . The church was located right out here
on this end of this building . The Ag building
was right there, and I don ' t know ••• never did
know what that was . That building wasn ' t there
when I got to Gee's Bend. But right here, at
the end of the school building, 8 ways out there,
was the church . It ' s now right up the road
above Mattie and Goldsby ' s house . They got
the mover from over yonder at Safford . Bozeman .
He came down there and he cut that church
exactly in half . Went from one side of it to
the other . Sawed the floors in a distinct
place. I watched him move it . I got over
there a lot. They started and sawed the
floor in two, the walls and the roof, then
they loaded up ODe half of it and went out
across the hills and hollows there with it,
dodging the power lines and the trees. Went
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over there and set it up , then come back and
got the other balf and pulled it in and placed
it just like a double- wide trailer . They
got them together , then patched it all the way
around. You can ' t •••• And I laughed and told
Borne of those folks, I said, "That building's
in better shape than it was over there . II
Because the dirt bad washed out from under the
pier, or something, and it was about to sink .
But they ' d bring the • ••• we'd have meetings
over there in church , and ��•••��
Now , did the gover nment build that church , too ,
at first?
Built the church, the Ag building, the whole
works . And , of cour se, later they come with
big block structure ~d they ••���• oh , and then
they deeded all this school property to the
County School Board , after they got it all
set up and gOing, they deeded that over some
years later. Of cours e , that was just showing
a ••••••
You don ' t know whose baby it is , though , do
you? Now, who took these pictures , do you
know?
I never did know that . I believe it was some­body
somewhat professional . It ' s too clear .
Well , they ' re forty something years old .
Yes , they ' re good pictures . And these little
Kodak pictures look like they were not taken
by the same one .
That principal ••••
Now , t 'hat ' s Street . No , Pierce .
Pierce . He ' s still living , I think . Pierce.
Teacher , gr oup of pupils . That ' s the original
schoolhouse that they had when Mr . Cammack and
all them went over there . Home made building,
just thrown up ther e . And they ' d also have '
church in it on Sunday .
So Mr . Julian Brown used to tell me about the
days when he worked in the old regional office
in Montgomery . Farm Security Regional office,
a five- state regional office. He was the real
estate director for the whole region . And
when they ' d set up one of these co- ops , he'd
have to go out and confer with the county
people and other people on the r egional office
staff , plus state staff . Red-headed man , still
l iving in Auburn, retired several year s ago ,
JUlian Brown . And Mr . Julian used to laugh and
tell me, he tol d me this tale several times,
that when they came to Gee 's Bend and got all
the nuts and bolts in place to Bet up this
pro ject over there , they came over there and
had all the heads of famil ies and their spouses ,
about a hundr ed of them , to meet in this chur ch .
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And be said he was the Master of Ceremonies .
Said, "I got up there and explained 88 clearly
as I knew how, thinking of the fact that most
of them were illiterate and suspicious of
outsider s. II They hadn ' t seen any white
people much , and a lot of children over there ,
sixteen or eighteen years old, never been
to Camden , even though there was a ferry .
They just didn't get to Camden . No cars. When
I got to Gee ' s Bend , there were two motor
vehicles over there ••• thr ee . The principal
of the school bad one; the Vocational Agricul­ture
, W. D. Brown , be bad one ; and the Co - op
store over there had a truck a small trUCk .
Those were the only motor vehicles over there.
None of the families had any kind of motorized
vehicles , not even a tractor .
Anyway, Mr . Brown said they had the meeting
over there , and he had this staff there with
him, with all the papers to si§n up for this
pr oject . Big project . Said, I explained it
all to them, asked for questions; some of them
asked some questions . When I quit getting
questions, I asked if any of them bad anything
to say , we 'd l ike to hear from you . Trying to
make it clear this is all open and above
board . II He said, IIIf there are no other
questions , we got some tables ••• II , think he
said they had some folding tables they had set
up around there , in front of the room , and some
cler ks , typists and all; and help f r om the
county office from over here was over there, to
sign them up . He said , IINow , men and women ,
get together in pairs , so you can go by and
sign at the same time . 1I
He said , uWhen they all got up, right in front
of me was one old man , " ••• and I think I figured
out who he was . It was an old man named Patrick
Bendolph , Sr . ' Cause I knew old man Patrick
quite well. He was a fine old man. He ' d go
barefooted all summer when he was eighty years
old, and plow a mule , barefooted, just like a
boy . He didn ' t ever wear any shoes , he told
me . But old man Patrick was quick to say
kinda what he thought , if you give bim a chance
to .
And he (Brown) said, "This old man just kept
sitting there right in front , in the' middle
of the bench, about two benches from the front II ,
and Mr . Brown said, IIEverytime I 'd move and
turn around, I ' d feel his eyes following me .
When I 'd move over the other way , I ' d feel his
eyes following me . Finally , to break the ice ,
I walked over and says , ' Ain ' t you going to
sign up? ' II And Mr. Brown said, "That man paid
me the best compliment I ever had anybody pay
me . I knew distinctly what he was talking
about . He told me , in about these wor ds :
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'Yas, sub, I believe I is goin' sign up ,
'cause you looks like 8 stationary gentle­man
to me'." Br. Brown said, in all his
days that was the best compliment he could
be paid . In other words, said, "You'll
stay hitched . "
That ' s right . I can depend on you .
You're not trying to feed me 8 line . And
he told me, "Don It ?t0u ever cross them up
on account of thst. I He waB State Director
then. But that 's where they met to set that
thing up.
NOw , there was 8 Mr. Hudgens ••••
Hudgens? He was out
I remember his Dame .
Regional Office .
of the Regional Office.
He was out of the
I wonder if he's still living?
12
Now, wait a minute. I believe by my day he
had gotten to the National office . Yeah , I
think be had. I remember hearing Mr. Hudgens .
He had a lot to do with the actual mechanics
and the building all the buildings . That was
a major accomplishment over there. They cut
the lumber ••••
Where did they cut all that lumber?
Over there. There was 10,243 acres of land
over there. Lot of timber . And they cut
timber there, as I understood it, and got it
sawed and dressed . I don 1t know where they
got all that done. I never dreamed of it .
But I remember seeing pictures in this book
of a shed ••••
Of a warehouse, uh, huh. Yes, looks like a
shed.
Warehouse. Well , they had all this lumber
stored, and as much as they could; but they
precut their lumber to build a house or a
barn, right there .
It was pre- fabricated housing, 'near about,
wasn 1t it? Almost .
See, once those carpenters were in , carpenter
foremen there , some of them looking for jobs
in the thirties , and they 1d give them a native
crew of men over there , and they 1d get things
set up and go out there and precut a whole
house; 1cause most of the houses were just
exactly the same size . And then they ' d haul
the house in pieces . They wouldn 1t be in
sections . And then they 1d throw it up, and
they'd build a house .
So , they 1d get a house, a new house; 8 barn;
smokehouse; chicken house; 8 well , a deep well;
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and 8 privy; with 8 hand pump, 8 heavy duty
hand pump. for about $1400.00 . And the
1 3
workers , they told me that during the depression
they'd get about fifty cents 8 day . Well,
that's about what I used to ge t after I'd
been to college . I ' d come home in the
summer, work on the farm , or do any work in
the county . Well , when I worked for the
county , county road or bridge gang , I'd get
a dollar 8 day for that . Wasn't any eight
hous day _ It was more like twelve or fourteen.
NOW , that land belonged to the VandeGrssffs
and who else?
The VandeGrasffs, Mr. White Smith , who became
a millionaire later, at Ja ckson , Alabama .
Yeah , lumber company. And his son died not
l ong ago , didn't he?
No , that was bis brother .
Was that his brother? Clarence was his brother?
Clarence was his brother . Clarence was the
last of the Smith brothers . Percy Smith was
one of his brother s, lived at Cannon Bend .
And Mr . Clarence , with Mr. White , as I under­stood
it, Clarence worked for Mr. White, and
Mr. White bought out Barrett- Holman Lumber
Company , right here in Camden , down here, and
set that up and Clarence ran it . And talk was
that it was assumed that Mr . White gave ClarenCe
this over here, just gave it to him . But Mr .
White Smith owned about 1500 acres over there in
a section of Gee's Bend we still call Whites .
I know where Whites is , and those folks know
where Whites is.
Yeah . they talk about it all the time. Whites
and Sodom .
Yeah , I know where Sodom is. And Long Bottom .
Long Bottom down there . There's an island
used to be right in the middle of the riVer.
We called that Buzzard's I s land . On the map
I think they show it as Hurricane Island.
And, of course, now with the dam , it ' s gone .
You don ' t even see Hurricane Island no more .
I know where it is if I get there .
But Mr. Clarence , he grew cotton over there
mostly with wage hands . And during his time,
he was a single man over there , by the way;
big old bachelor, wore about a fourteen or
sixteen shoe, or something. I saw him one
time in my life . He spoke to the Camden Ex­change
Club one night . Somebody invited him
over here , and that ' s the first and only time
I ever saw him to know him . And I met him
and got to talk to him just • little bit, and
told him I had been the Granddaddy of Gee ' s
Bend . He kinda perked up at that . Used to
tell Borne tales on some of those folks over
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there , said, "Mr. White didn't ask you to
do nothing on the farm that he couldn't do
twice as much as you could. 1I Said he was a
big man , Single and able bodied and touch .
He 'd get rough, you know .
Yeah , straighten folks out, could he?
14
Said he could cuss 8 blue streak. But, while
be was over there, he got some joker to come
in with 8 little peckerwood 5awmill • • that s
what they used to call them ••• set it up in 8
day and start cutting lumber the next day.
Come in and cut his own lumber and get wagons
and mules , and they 'd haul lumber across the
ferry down here to Ellis' Ferry into Camden.
Green lumber. And those folks, some of them
I used to know, that said, "I was one of his
lumber wagon drivers . " Said, "We'd make
two trips to Camden a day, if we started early
enough . And that was daylight. 11 Said, "Have
to go two wagons together. When we'd get to
the ferry , the wagon would go on the ferry . 1I
They 'd have to get one off on the other side •••
no , get the mules off on the other side.
Let's see •• they said they could get both
wagons and four mules on the ferry at one
time. And unhitch the mules . When they'd
get to the other side, tbeyl d have to hitch
all four mules to the wagon to get it up the
bank, then take all four down there and get
the other wagon , bring it up the bank, then
come into Camden .
No wonder it took all day.
Then, going back, they ld have to trot those
mules all the way, because Mr . White'd be
cussing them out if they didn't get on back.
So that ' s how he got in the sawmill business ,
right there , and from there he went to
Jackson , Alabama; sold out over there (Gee's
Bend) to the government and that got him his
start right there . He was a broke man. Just
an old bachelor man on his own . And the other
portion of Gee ls Bend, about two thousand
acres, belonged to the Spurlin family. And,
as I understood it , I didn rt know Mr . Spurlin,
but I knew Mrs. Spurlin ; I knew John Spurl in
and I knew Leon Spurlin , last son . He died
about a year ago up here in the Red and White
Grocery Store . He fell dead . But , 8S I under­stood
it, Mr. Spurlin ran also an advancing
business r ight here i n Camden . So , he had 8
bunch of famil ies .
(Some workers are preparing to leave the office
and her e follows a general discussion of what
time they come to work and when they leave.)
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Oh, I wanted to show you one other thing.
I know who this is . Now, this woman is
still living. There's Edgar Mooney over
there, and that's his wife and a bunch of ••••
Dew, wait a minute. I got this wrong. That's
not Edgar's wife. That's Cherokee Coleman,
she is now, but when this picture was made,
she was Cherokee Pettway. And that is one
of her boys. What's his name? Been grown
years and years; and I'm sure that daughter
and that daughter married in Gee's Bend . They
still live there. I don't know what became
of the others. But this boy, he got a farm.
I made him 8 loan to buy one of the farms
over there. He's no boy no more . Oh, what
is his name?
Well, I did want to •••• what's this? Old china
closet, to take in their new home. Quilt.
This is quilting. Now , this was the Home
Supervisor, that woman in white. I don't
know who she was talking to. I might have
known her one time, but I don 't know. I
don't recall them, but that's s omething about
this garden. They pushed gardening over there,
you know, and all ••••• Oh, they had these
canning plants . You ever hear anything about
the canning plants?
Yes, I 've heard them talk about the canning
plants .
They had canning plants on a co-op basis and
made share of using them. That's old man Roman
Pettway, Sr. He was a stalwart man over there.
He always had money. I never had to loan him
any money. He had money.
Now, how did he manage to have money? Was he
thrifty?
He was smarter than the rest of them. He was
thrifty, yeah . He raised children enough
that he could make a lot of cotton.
Let's see, there was one picture I wanted
to show you . I don't know which book it's
in.
You got any idea who that one is?
I believe that's Jacob Bendoff's wife, but
I'm not sure. I don't recall her name, but
I worked for the Health Department and I know
she was on their list with TB. She had TB
for years.
Look at that whole sack of flour. Twenty­four
pound sack of flour, and sugar, too, I
think. Oh, this is the gin platform. This
is the old gin platform. That's where they
rolled the bales out on it, and if they wanted
to load them in trucks, then all they had to
do was tumble them .
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Well, the gin, while William Collins up here
was the store manager; and, undoubtedly, he
was the best one we ever had . I mean he ran
it on a strict basis. The Supervisor was
al ways fussing at the Manager about letting
too much goods out on credit. And the Manager
previous to him got to where he bad like a
seven thousand dollar credit limitation, by
regulation of the state Director. That previous
manager, he'd have 8 run of eleven or twelve
thousand dollars, and couldn't get it ••••
You may have known him, Dr . Paul Jones . Well ,
there he is in the old clinic . They had a
clinic building over there right by the scbool.
It looks like a dwelling . That building ' s
still standing.
Got some lattice on it?
Yeah . That building" still standing. Well,
that's the building they used for, I think,
8 once- a - week clinic. And Dr . Paul was over
her e and used to tell me about going over
there to Gee ' s Bend, and he loved it. He
really did. Somebody'd get him , if he didn ' t
have a way; if they didn't have a ferry where
he could drive over on the ferry and go on
over there - meet him at the river . He was
a relatively young man .
Wonder what happened to his records? I bet
he kept records of Gee's Bend.
I don't know. He used to ask me a lot of
questions about it .
Now, this man here, that's Stokes Haynes.
I remember Stokes. He was the supervisor, the
man supervisor , under Mr . Cammack, and he
lived at Annie Manie . Stokes Haynes,
H- a - y- n-e-s, Haynes . That ' s the old house.
And I know who he is, that was Little Pettway.
Now, he was the head man over there?
He was the head honcho . I cleared everything
with Littl e. And once I got Little in my
confidence, where I could talk to him and
make them think I wasn't trying to crook
them, Little and I got along real well.
He was a ginner, too. He ' d put on his metal
rim glasses and go to work at the gin; keep
metiCUl ous gin records. And I got to talking
to him , though, after some years ; got to
talking to him one day and he was looking at
a paper; and I realized all at once Little
was having to put that paper right up here .
I sayd, IILittle , take your glasses off and
let me look at your eyes. II He took his
glasses off, and I could just see ••• what do
you call them? •• cataracts, in both eyes.
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I said, "You ever had anybody tell you you
had anything wrong with your eyes?" He said,
"Naw , sir . I ain't never been to 8 doctor . II
I said, "Well, I got reason to believe you
got cataracts . Would you go to an eye doctor
if I can get you some help?" He said, "Yaa,
suh. I feel like I ' , 'bout to go blind . I
don ' t know wbether rIm going to be able to keep
the gin records another year. II
So , I got hold of the Vocational Rehabilitation
repre s entative and told him what I had over
there. Anyway, we got him to , I think it was
Dr . Callaway, in Selma; and I was anxious to see
how that thing worked out, and I knew the day
be was supposed to go . I got a copy of the
l etter notifying him to go . And I went over
there to see him. Got over there and he was
sitting on the porch with a patch over one
eye . And he hadn't been but a day before yes­terday
•••���
He 'd had that surgery, huh?
So I said "Little, ain ' t you been in the
hospi tal? r, He said , "Naw , suh , lain' t been
in the hospital . " I said, "Well, did he operate
on your eye?" He said , "Yes, suh~ he operated
on it." I said, "Where were you?' He said,
I'Sitting up in a chair. " And it must have
been the simplest type of cataract, because I
know there a r e different degrees of cataracts .
And he had a patch on it .
I said, "When you got to go back?" Said, "Next
week , same day next week . Next week goin ' to
take this patch off, and if that eye'. all
right , then he goin ' to fix up my other eye ."
And he did . Two weeks in a row he removed
cataracts from both eyes , sitting up in a
chair, and let him come home the same day .
And you know , once his eyes got well , he just
cleared up and could see all right, just like
he always did .
And I know he was always grateful to you .
He said, "That sho was a blessing . 11
Now , this was a
D- i - c- k- s - o-n •
• • • • • • • • • •
character. That ' s Dr. Dickson .
I believe bis wife'S still
(End Side 2 , Tape 1)
(Begin Side 1, Tape 2)
That Dr . Dickson was 8 pistol ball. He was
tough talking, but a good country doctor. Dr.
Paul was a good country doctor.
And he's just pouring ether on a cloth there and
just ••••••••
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Just on 8 cloth the r e over the face , and put
that ether; that ' s the way they used to do it .
or course , i n a hospital , they had a mask.
Now, that was the first Ag teacher over there .
Do you know what his name was?
w. D. Brown ••• He was the teacher before W. D.
W. D. came following him, and I used to know
what his name was . Brown was already there.
Dillard. They called W. D. Dillard Brown .
He ' s got a littl e store over ther e .
Brown ' s One Stop .
He r etired - when? Last year? As Vocational
teacher at Wilcox County High . They had an
NYA pr ogr am over there years ago . That ' s
Nat ional YOQth Administration , under Roosevelt,
you know .
Now , that looks like a horse collar .
That ' s a corn shuck horse collar and a rug
thing , a pad, a mat made out of corn shucks .
Now they ' re too proud to do any of that .
That ' s one of the modern cook stoves they
bought them , and they ' d loan them operating
type money to get that.
Her e's the school building , modern school , you
know; got panelling on it . Now , here ' s the
clinic. Community Center Clinic . Each
Thu r sday all examinations given , diseases
diagnosed by a licensed physician. Now , that
was Dr . Paul , but Dr . Dickson did some work
down there. He just drove straight down
through the woods , about eighteen mil es down
there to Gee ' s Bend .
I reckon this is that work shop . There's one
of the old canning plants . Screened all the
way around , and they got a brick, f urnace like
thing, like the old fUrnaces used to be, with
a chimney . Well , it sticks up over there some­where.
And , then, on that they had, I believe ,
a metal coverj I remember seeing them . They
had a heavy metal cover over there , and they
could set these giant pressure canners up there.
Those giant ones, not like those little home
canners like this. They had some giant ones .
They could put, I reckon , forty - eight jars at
a time in them . Set them up there and screw
those l i ds down on them . And one of those
darn things over there , there was a woman,
and I 'm sure she's still living , Spurlin
Pettway ' s wife • •••
Indiana .
Yeah , you know her? You notice around her
face?
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Yes , I had noticed.
I got to talking with her. I didn ' t know all
this , snd I got to talking to her about doing
Borne canning one time , just casual , you know .
"I ain I t gain I use none of them things . II
I said , "How come?" She said, "Don't you see
where I been burned? One of them things blew
up on me . II I found out, some of the rest of
them told me, they made 8 mistake and didn't
get the s8al around it, or something; anyway,
they didn ' t get the thing down good .
And it blew up , and that ' s where she got those
scars?
Th a t ' s where she got the scars . I still want
to find that picture .
Here 's 8 history from Virginia . University of
Vi r gin ia .
Yeah .
Now , that was in the New York Times.
I ought to know who that was. Didn ' t s eem
like he left many years after I got her e . I
remember ho~ he could talk . He ~as a Sight,
grinning all the time he ~as talking . This
is the old big house.
The old Pett~ay house , ~asn't it?
It ~as setting up on the hill .
Is that what they call Sendy Hill?
It's right ~here Clay Pett~ay 's ~ido~ lives,
Leah Pettway. And she married Bir den O.
Pett~ay l ater , and she had to come over here
and see me, to see if I thought it was all
right . I had been a~ay f r om the government
a l ong time . Leah come to see me to see if
I thought it was all r ight for her to ma r ry
Birden.
But there ' s a story about that house . Now ,
I never got this from Mr . Cammack . I got
it from some of the people over there. And
right out across the road from this ~as ~h e r e
they h ad that warehouse , and there ' s a ne~
brick home built there, ~it h a chain l i nk
fence around it . Got to be somebody ' s school
teacher , or something . I inspect the sept ic
tank when they put in a septic tank .
But any~ay, that house was sitting right
across the road from there , and the l ast
person to live in that house was a white
man who worked for the VandeGraaffs. He ~8S
kind of their overs eer . He lived alone and
had no family, but he sold produce out of
there , you know, like stor e goods ; and it
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was his enterprise, too. That wasn't
VandeGrasffs , that was his deal. And in
that house, up in the hallway, somewhere
through the hallway up there, it looked
20
kinde like a dog trot through that house;
looked like i t might have gone through there,
but, on the other hand, it might have gone
right across this way . Under that, inside
that porch in that incline in that hallway,
was 8 big old iron 88fe, just like they used
to have down at the store. And that old man
used it as a kind of water shelf, to set 8
bucket of water up there with his wash pan,
in the old days. And that old man died and
was buried somewhere , I don lt know. Well,
that house stood vacant for some time, and
that old safe still sitting up there, locked,
and nobody throught any thing about it.
Well , finally, there came a day when Geels Bend
started developing over there , and Mr . Cammack
was the head man . He was down around the
store ares, that general area where the post­office
is now, one day; and I had a man , he's
still living, Sam Irby ; he ' s known over there
as Nonnie . I hear Sam ' s getting right old ,
I don ' t know if his mind ' s too good yet . But
Sam told me this story and others verified it .
He was working in a crew Mr . Cammack sent up
there with a white boss from Tuscaloosa - he
said all they knew was that man said he lived
in Tuscaloosa - to tear down this old house ,
and later they built a house right in that
ar ea for John Henry and Gertrude Miller . They
been dead and gone some years now. And Clay
inherited their ~roperty by will . That old
couple told me , tHow can •••• we ain ' t got no
chillun, and we know we both gettin ' old, how
can we leave this property to Clay?!! I said,
"Why you want to leave it to Clay?" Said ,
!t ' Cause he the only one over here pay any
attention to us. " Well , Clay, he was renting ,
I had helped him rent their land ••••
Clay Pet tway?
Clay Pettway . He was Leah's first husband.
They had eighteen children, by the way, and
raised nearly all of them . Some of them died
in infanc y, they used to tell me. But , Clay
had been good to them . He had a pickup truck,
and he ' d go get that old couple when they wanted
to come to Camden and go to the health depart­ment,
or the bank, buy groceries . He ' d see
after them . Well , it was just an act of kind­ness.
He wasn ' t any kin to them. And some
years went by and they sent for me . I didn ' t
have any business with them , so I went by there
to s ee what they wanted. All they wanted to
know was how can they leave all they own to
Clay , at the de ath of the last one of them .
And I said, "Well , the only way to do that
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right, you got to go to a lawyer's office,
and don't put it off. Go on to the lawyer's
office and tell that lawyer what you telling
me. And, basically, what you want to do is
leave a will. That lawyer might decide you
might want to fix up a deed with a clause in it
to give you the right to live on it the rest of
your natural life. He might deed it to him
here and now. But reserve the right to live on
it the rest of your life , whichever is best,
and he can advise with you . fI
They came over here later right away, the next
week or so, and came to Joe Robins Bonner.
Joe Robins and Jean, his wife, were good friends
of mine and my wife, and so they hadn ' t been
over here but a day or 80, and we were together
one night and Jean and Joe Robins said , lIWe had
a customer from over at Gee 's Bend fl , and told
us about this old couple coming over and they
f ixed them up a will. Well, anyway, that
house was there, John Henry Miller 's house,
and Clay later moved when they started building
the dam. He ~hought the river was going to back
up and cover his house . That's the funniest
thing. He done paid Bozeman up yonder a
thousand dollars to come down here and move
his house up there by John Henry's house ,
right at the end of it, just separated a little
bit. I said, flClay, you crazy, that river
won It cover you. fI He said, "Hit done got up
that high, another rain and hit's gonna get up
on the house." One thing, that got him away
from down there and gave him a little more
privacy.
Well, what did they do with that old safe in
there?
Oh, oh. When Mr . Cammack sent that crew with
that supervisor up there, to tear that old
house down, said they went in there and they
took the roof off of it, tearing the walls down,
bringing the old house down. Don't know what
they did with the lumber. Just hauled it off
or used it for framing, or something. That
old safe was there, and said that white man
boss from Tuscaloosa , thet is all they knew,
he was from Tuscaloosa, down there working
for overseer 's wages, had a sixteen pound
sledge hammer , and he told some of the men
there, IIGo get that sledge hammer and bring
it around." So they brought that sledge hammer
around and he said, "Now, go to work on that
safe right there. fI So they started pounding
on that old safe right where he told them,
and he said, "Just keep beating. tI
Well, finally, they beat in the door. They
beat a hole in that door, where he could open
that door, and he did; and Sam Irby always
swore to me that when he opened that door on
that safe, the greenbacks just poured out on
the floor. He said, "green money". Paper
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money just poured out on the floor. And said
as that man began to gather, he gathered up
all that money and put it in a shoe box, Sam
told me , and his car was parked out there,
and he went out there and unlocked the trunk
of his car and put that shoebox down in that
car .
And in the meantime, somebody done come along
and saw what wes going on and went on down the
road and told Mr. Cammack . Said, "That maD
up yonder done broke open that old safe in
that old house and found 8 bunch of money in
it; and be done put it in his car. II Said Mr .
Cammack came up there and Sam , he said , "I
thought Mr . Cammack and that man, one of them,
going to kill the other one about that . II And
that man never did give in to Mr . Cammack,
and Mr . Cammack was telling him that was govern­ment
property. "You're violating the law,
you can't do it. II He said, IIGovernment property ,
hell, that's mine. Finders keepers . I got
what I found in that safe and it ain't none
of your business . II And that night, when
quitting time came, that man left and never
did come back to Gee ' s Bend no more . And I
never got a chance to ask Mr. Cammack about that,
but that's what Sam told me .
And I believe he ' d tell you the truth, don't
you?
I thought he was at the time. And later, I
asked Borne of the rest of them what they knew
about it , and they said they always heard that
man did open the safe and found a bunch of
folding money, and they thought it belonged
to that last old white man that lived in that
house , and sold goods across the counter, and
supposed to have been working for VandeGraaff .
He l ived to be an old man, and they didn' t
doubt it, because they said he never went any­where
to spend any money. Said he lived hard .
I did want to show you an old house. There's
one of them big canners they used in a canning
plant. Well, I guess that's probabl y in a
canning plant, I don't know. But that's the
kind they had , the huge canners there. This
is one of the old houses; rived out shingles.
Well, that's board, that t s not logs. Shell
these penders - peanuts . Now , I used to know
what that old couple was.
Now, they grew a lot of peanuts down there,
too, didn 't they?
Yeah . Well, they, in fact, tried to grow
peanuts for sale as a cash crop_
I l ike that picture .
Yeah , how 'bout that? Now, I used to know
who that was, but I can 't remember. That's
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half a barrel; they sawed a barrel half in
two and made a tub out of it. Now, there ' s
Edgar Mooney and his wife ••• I can't remember
what her name was •••• but both of them are
still living. Edgar Mooney ••••
Didn't he run the ferry?
Yeah, he used to be the ferryman. Edgar ' s still
living. He 's getting quite old, and he 's
feeble and sickly. Been sickl y for years.
No meat on his bones. But his mind might be
all right. Might be clear .
That 's a typical house. See there , that's
probably no doubt the original main house.
This is improvement , two rooms and a runway.
In other words , they needed more room because
they got more children and need more room , so
instead of adding on the original house, they
move out here and leave a dogtrot , or runway,
be t ween and added another room out here with
a chimney, where they could heat it . You
know, they never join two rooms right straight
together; you know that is bad luck in itself.
They had that belief. That ' s probably some
African belief .
I wonder how they got them to move in those
new houses where all the rooms touched?
That ' s a stick and dirt -chimney, what they
used to call it . They got clay, mixed salt
with it, and straw. My daddy used to tell
me sometimes if they could get enough horse
hair or hog hair. Hog hair was more plentiful .
When they killed hogs, they'd scrape the hair
off . You ' d accumulate the hog hair and put
it in with that red clay mud, with salt; that
salt would make it hard and get a glossy
finish where it wouldn't soak water, and then
the hair would hold it together . But they
could use straw, just old straw of any kind,
wheat straw , whatever you got . Now, bere's
your dog trot, with a prop on the shutters,
see there. Crude construction, logs and
shingles. That's what they l ived in . Look
there, air just pour through there. They
probably never had bad colds ' til they got
in that tight house . Chimneys only a mass of
mud and clay, but they could burn a fire in
there and get by with it , if they didn ' t
get the fire too high .
There they are . Some did
That ' s the shed up there .
in there .
frame
They
work only_
had saws and
Now, was that near •��•• where was that shed?
That was immediately across the road from
that old big house we were talking about .
See , there they are, building a barn . They
set cedar posts - they got cedar right off
all
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that plantation back out in that prslr18
north of this store here - in that limestone
section. And they put those cedar posts
five feet in the ground, tamp them and then
build a frame around them. And some of those
barns are still sitting right there on those
cedar posts.
Now, somebody told me they built the barn
before they did the house.
Now, here's the warehouse shed, with a water
tank. This is the headquarters of all that
construction. See, here ' s the rack for your
lumber.
I do wonder where that lumber was cut and
hauled away from.
See, there's one fitting joints for window
framing, right there . I know who that was
with that pipe. That wes Nelson Pettway .
Nelson was probably one of the better car­penters
over there . I know who that was .
I knew him before he died years ago. His
name was Joe M. Pettway. And that looks like
Clement Pettway, Cherokee ' s husband. She
had all them children by him . Without shoes,
there rs old Joe working without his shoes .
I feel certain that's Clement. Clement was
a good man and he hurt his knee and he got a
stiff leg. Had to walk on a stiff l eg.
Couldn rt bend his knee at all. And I knew
Cl ement quite well and Clement and Cherokee
were good folks , they just didnrt have any­thing
. Had a house full of younguns, and he
wasn rt able to do much plowing at all . What
they did, they did the best they could, I
always thought . And he had trouble with that
knee, and I got to talking to him about it
and asked him when did this all start . He
sai d he hit it with a hammer one time . The
hammer slipped; he was hitting something
and the hammer slipped off and hit him in the
knee, and he said it liked to kill him at the
time .
Then later I talked to ' Dr . Dickson about it.
I said, "Dr . Dickson , you ever doctor on
Clement Pettway?" Said, "Yeah. II I said,
IIDid you ever have any dealings with him
after be hurt his knee? He tol d me a hammer
hit him." Said, "Yeah, that rs right." I said,
"What happened to him that made his knee
stiff?" Said, "He r s got TB of the bone and
his knee is locked up . II Calcium deposit got
in the knee joint snd just locked it up .
See, there they are , finishing it up, you
know . And here rs Stokes Haynes. He ' s the man
Mr . Csmmack bad over there . Wel l, there ' s
the building over ther e at the school that
was the clinic buil ding . That ' s one of the
dwellings there, adding on the porch. They
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haven't put the rafters on the porch.
Now , was Stokes Haynes a bricklayer , too?
I don't know. All I knew was be was a farm
supervisor. There's one of the original
houses. An old ox . That 's what somebody
was plowing with over there . And there's one
living over there right now, Israel o. Pett­way.
Used to laugb and tell me, says, IIBefors
the project days, the old Rehabilitation
Program made me plow an ox for two years,
and I lost enough religion during that two
years to make up for all the rest of my life
before and after. II
Small boy from a family. That looks like
Cherokee. That's her boys. They had a dis­tinctive
look about them . And I believe that
one is living right next house up the road,
going out of Ge e 's Bend, from Gol dsby Ross
and Mattie 's. He 's on the right and his house
is setting kinda cockeyed to the road.
Yes , I know how it looks.
That's where I remember he lived, if I ain't
got it mixed up with somebody else. Now ,
that's a familiar face, but I can't remember
who she was. That ' s the way they cooked,
though. Majority of them cooked on the fi r e ­place
prior to p ro ject days. Meat and bread
and boil some collards. Potlikker. They'd
make potlikker with greens .
That's Dr . Dickson, I thought that was going
to be •••• and there's his nurse, real nurse.
Regular pr oject nurse . He's removing tonsils
there. I imagine that's what be's up to.
I bet they never lost a patient .
I don't imagine they did.
And that's Mr. Cammack .
There's Mr. Cammack, down there in some of
that corn. That corn was growing , they used
to tell me that was corn in St. John, they
called it, over in Long Bottom , before the
dam ever came. There was a section over
there where the land just fell off down in
a kind of a deep draw, gentle like; and then
went up to the river bank, and all that dirt
in there ••• What happened, when the river would
flood , the river would cut across there. It'd
get up high enough and come right off of
Hurricane or Buzzard Island, as we called it,
and Hurricane Island right up at the upper end,
and that river water cut across there and
sweep around through there, but wouldn ' t erode
this land. It put deposits in it. And I often
thought that that dirt there, you could cut
down ten feet deep and still find that same
loamy sand. And it would have a lot of humus in
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it , and if I ever saw a place in Alabama
make two hundred bushels of corn to the acre ,
under the right conditions , it would be right
there in what they used to call st . John.
Of course , it's covered up with water now .
But Mr . Cammack used to talk to -me about
St . John land, how it would gr ow corn . Look
how higb the ears are . Well , that's what
he's feeling for , an ear, right there .
Ther e ' s Dr . Dickson and the nurse ; tonsils
removed; school library.
Now , who are these , right here? You're one
of them?
Yeah, I 'm one of them . Now , that's Nettles
Ivey r ight there . Nettles Ivey was County
Supervisor and I was the Assistant at the
time . If I r emember cor rectly who these were,
that man there was with the Department of
Agr icultur e of Is r ael .
He was visiting over here?
He was visiting . We had visitors all the time .
And this man was from •• • • they came through
Washington first . This man , as I recall, was
f r om •••• what country was he from? He looks
sort of •••• Phil lipines . He ' s a Phillipine,
and he was with the Department of Agriculture
of the Phil lipine gover nment.
I don ' t know what these other pictures are .
These ar e some recent pictures we made of
Gee ' s Bend. That shows the school , and all
these things up ther e . There ' s the clinic
building . I don't know what that is , looks
like some of them down there taking noon in
the shade. Forty- five ears on the stalk .
Prolific corn .
Now , who is that Mr . Mr. Cammack , do you know?
No , I never did • • • l can't recognize who that
is. That looks a little l ike Little's shape ,
ther e; but I 'm not sure . See , they ' re stand­ing
up i n a wagon. That ' s how Mr . Cammack
got down there . See that mud on the wheel?
That ' s how he got down there , to keep from
getting his shoes muddy . There ' s Mr . Cammack
again . That ' s sugar cane .
Was that POJ?
I imagine so . POJ. That ' s the award they had
in that dwelling over there , of that clinic
building. There's big Clint O. Pettway . He
was a huge man. Ther e was an old man lived
over there i n Gee's Bend, named Ottaway
Pet tway . Did you ever hear of him?
I ' ve seen his name.
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Uncle Ottaway . I called him Uncle Ottaway
to them . Uncle Ottaway lived to be , by my
calculation, best as I could calculate it
for his boys , that he was one hundred and
t wo and over when he died, and the summer
befor e he died, he picked cotton , I know.
I'm sure he chopped and hoed cotton , but he
was out picking cotton that fall , and it
was spring sometime when he died.
But Clint 0 , was one of eight boys that that
old man had . Living now is Israel Pettway,
Israel 0 . , and they called him Sharper .
That ' s his nickname , Sharper . So you might
ask some of them about Sharper. And be t s got
a brother Darned Ed O. Ed O. ' s still living.
Any more l iving now? Ther e was eight origi­nally.
There was Cl int 0., Tom 0. , Ed 0.,
•••• Mr . Cammack , by the way , had 8 tradition
when he went over there . None of them had
middle named, and the government had a place
on all their forms for 8 middle initial .
So he gave them all an .,O"?
He gave •••• no, he gave this family 110" . He
used a rule that was very simple . He used
for a middle initial the first initial of
their father . Ottawar, was their Daddy's
name , so they used 110 1 for the middle initial .
It was as simple as that . So, there were
eight boys , and, as far as I know, only one
girl , and I saw her last week . I went over
there to check Day Care Centers, and at one
of the Day Care Centers this womaD told me,
said, lIyou know Arie ' s oldest daughter is here
from New York, and she told me two or three
times she sho would like to see Mr . Lee .
Said she ain ' t seen you since she left home . II
And she was a teeD age girl when she left
home .
So I said, "She down there at Arie's house?"
Arie ' s house was across the road and down a
little side r oad up there , and I said, "Ain ' t
Arie disabled?1I Said, IIYeah, you know she
was in a car wreck and broke her leg , and
' sides that sbe broke her arm , left arm and
right leg somehow. 11 Broke her arm first.
Said , "Sbe's been in a wheelchair , but she
can move around a little now . II So I said ,
"Well , I 'll go see both of them . II
I went over there and that woman, that daughter
of hers , she ' S forty something years old, got
two great big boys, and she works for the
postal department in New York state, maybe
New York City, she told me . And that woman
hugged my neck. And said, "Mr . Lee , I know
you done seen • • • • " this woman ' s name up
there . I said, "Yeah, she told me you was
home and I can remember when you and your two
sisters were just like little door steps . You
was the tallest, and the next one that high,
and down like that . II
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And she acted like she was truly glad to
see me, and old Arie has always been. And
sbe's the only sister to these IIO"S. She
was Ottaway's only daughter. Ei ght boys and
one g irl.
And it was unique how I figured up for Herman .
There was one named HermaD O. Ottaway was
'way up in years. He said, "Us 'd like to know
how old Papa is." I said, "You got any way
to figure it?1I He said, III thought of some­thing
. Mama always told us she was eighteen
years younger than Papa, and she died Buch­and-
such 8 year , and she was so old when she
died. II So I went from there. I got to calcu­lating
. At eighteen years, she was so old
when she died; and eighteen years difference
in their age, that made him sO 'old when sbe
died; and I figured how many years she ld been
dead, and it came out to one hundred and two.
Well, he didn l t live but a few months after
that . And a funny thing , he used to come
over here, and right across the street from
my house is the McNeil house - I donlt know
whether you remember Earl McNeil, Merle and
Laura Dale McNeil - used to work for the Board
of Education •••••••
(End Side 1, Begin Side 2 , Tape 2)
When he was ninety something, he'd come over
there every winter and work in their yard for
them, just utterly clean it, and he'd spend a
week over in Camden . Held come across the
river in a skiff and walk into Camden. Get
over there and they ld have the tools, and he 'd
work around their yard . Feed him dinner.
He ' d stay around Camden somewhere. He had
somebody close kin. And that was their Daddy.
And he was still dOing that, I know, when he
was ninety-five, because I looked out of my
house one Saturday afternoon, and he was
working in the McNeil yard. It was cold that
day , it was a cold wind blowing, and I thought
about I had a military officer l s topcoat, and
never did like the thin g . Felt like it was
too short for me, or something. And that thing
was just hanging in a closet, and I'd had it
for all that time, and it was a good coat, and
I went in there and I thought to myself, I
bet that coat will fit old man Ottaway. He
was a little shorter than I was and I bet it'd
be just r ight for him.
I went in my ,closet, I didn't even tell my wife,
I just went and got that thing and carried it
over there, and I said, "0ttaway , turn around
here and try this coat on . II Put it on him,
and it was just right. He told everybody he
could ever see , IIMr. Lee gave me this coat . 11
And, by the way, when •••• naw, it wasn't him •• ••
yeah, it was. You know that picture we had
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over here in the front , of the man from Israel
and ODe from the Phillipines? There ~8S 8
man with them that took that picture, and he
was from out of Washington state; and while
we was traveling around that day , he said ,
"LeCroy , I'd like to talk to the oldest per son
in Gee ' s Bend that can tell me somethin~ about
the history of this country over there. He
was from Tennessee , originally , or the south ,
you know , and knew something about these folks.
So I said, ~ I got your maD , but you ' re going
to have to let me help you keep him straight .
His mind wanders some . He caD tell you.
Probably talk about things that happened eighty
years ago better thaD he can about what happen­ed
yesterday . II
We went down to old man Ottaway ' s house and we
talked to him a little while, and he talked to
him and asked him questions about the old
ginn ing days . That was one distinctive thing
that stuck out . Ottaway could remember just
as well when he used to work at the old
fashioned gin , where they 'd pack the cotton
in the press wi th their feet . Then , finally,
they ' d get enough in there and they ' d get to
bagging and ran the ties up there in place .
And then they ' d have a big old screw they 'd
have to work . The screw was on top , and they
had a mul e to pull that, like a syrup mill,
pull that screw down on top of that bale,
to scr ew it down tight enough; and it was still
bigger bales in those days than now . And
that ' s how the gin packed cotton , get it in
the bag and tie it .
So, when we got through , that man had a good
camera , he said , "You reckon I could get Uncle
Ottaway ' s picture?" I said, "Yeah . But I
won ' t ask him to go down the steps . 1I So we
got the old man , and I helped him , he was just
in his r egular old clothes , you know , like he
wore , patches on them . He was worried about
he wasn ' t dr essed up . I said, "We don ' t care
if you' re dr es sed up , Ot t away, I ain ' t never
seen you dressed up in my l i fe . We want a
picture of you just l ike it is . II And took
h i m out on the end of the porch wher e he would
stand in the sun, and that man got on the ground
and took the picture of him up on that porch.
And from Washington , D. C. , he sent that
picture back to me . It was jus t as clear
as it could be. So I put it in my bag to
carry to Ottaway. I carried it over there
one day , and by that time he was bedridden.
He took th at pictur e up and held it up , and
he star ted giggling , and said , "That ' s the
first picture that ' s ever been made of me in
my life . " Now , he I s one hundred and two
years ol d . I said , "Ottawa1t, somet i me some­body
snapped a picture . It 'Naw , s uh , this the
first pictur e ever been made . That ' s sho me . "
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And you kno~, after be d i ed, I wen t down to
Ed O.' s house and went in his house , looked
up on the mantel piece and ther e was an
eight by ten enl argement of that , in a f r ame ,
of old man Ottaway . He was al ready dead and
gone by then . Up on the mantel piece was
that picture , and I l ooked up there and said ,
IlUh , huh , there ' s your daddy ' s picture . II
He said , !lYse , and you got it taken and give
him that picture that I got it made from . II
And he said , "All us chillun got on e made
f r om i t . "
Now , aren ' t you glad they did that?
Yeah , I was tickl ed to death . And old Ed
just kinde started shedding tears 8 l ittle bit
and said , "You know , we finally got Papa last
year to join the chur ch , when be was over 8
hundred 7.8ars old . He got r eligion befor e
he died . I
Now, that ' s hog k i l l i ng .
You know who those are?
That ' s Roman Pettway , Sr . There ' s Roman , Jr.,
lives in Gee ' s Bend . That ' s Roman , Sr. , right
ther e . And I declare I don ' t know who that is
behind the hogs , ther e . But that ' s ol d man
Roman .
Now , he was a leader down ther e , too, wasn' t
he?
Oh , yeah . I tell you how Roman used to make
money . He r an a sho r t loan business over ther e .
Ver y quiet .
He was a pr eacher , too , wasn ' t he?
He was a pr eacher, Rev . Roman , yeah . But in
my deal i ngs wi th him , he was utterly f a ir .
Somewhat stand- off ish from me , and I had an
idea he was f rom Mr. Cammack. Somebody said he
and Mr. Cammack used to •• • • had times ••• ••
Littl e odds , huh?
Yeah , didn' t agree
what independent .
I'm sure they were
over ther e .
on things, but he was some­I
don ' t know who tha t i s .
dead and gone bef ore I go t
And t hat ' s Van Pettway , they said .
Oh , that ' s little
yeah . I knew Van
him to Tuskegee .
You did?
Van , without
quite well.
the l egs .
In f a ct, I
Yeah,
got
And talked ' til I was blue i n t he face trying
to get his daddy and mama - his daddy was
Van, Sr . - he went for pr eacher , too . Good
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old man, very superstitious, and I talked
and talked and talked about getting the Cripple
Children's Service to get him to Tuskegee ,
and go to Andrews Clinic.
Now , was he born that way?
Born with Ma-deformed legs .
Just little nubs?
I don 't know what they looked like. And the
way he walked was, originally, he had two big
tomato cans that be 'd lace his arms on, and he ' d
scoot along the ground. But later somebody,
I don't know who, took some hardwood and made
him some pretty little pedestal like things,
with a rubber sale on the bottom, made out of
8 piece of tire rubber, I reckon, so he wouldn't
slip on anything slick; and, boy, he CQuid scoot
along the floor on those things . Well , little
Van got s ome education .
But , anyway, getting back to the Tuskegee deal,
I talk.d to th.m finally •••• th. Cripple Children
people told me that it was probable that some
expert doctors could consider making ••• removing
the little old mal- d.form.d l.gs and forming
stumps, and from that give h im legs and let him
go through enough physical therapy , and he ' d
learn to walk. So I talked to little Van , and
I said , uWouldn't you like to stand up and
walk like a man?" "Yas, suh." And, of course,
he was a minor, and be had to have his parents '
consent, so I ' d go talk to old man Van and his
wife, Mary. That was his first wife. He ' s got
a living wife, a s econd wife. And •••• he ' s got
a living widow, the man's dead •••• and little
Van's dead.
And so I'd go talk to them and they wouldn't
consent, but, finally, in due time, they did
con sen t for him to go to Tuskegee . And he got
up there to Andrews' Clinic , and something
happened. He came home after a week or so , and
he didn't even want to talk about it. I couldn't
get anything out of Little Van .
NOW , about how old was he?
Oh , fourteen, fifteen , something . Sixteen
was the cut -off date for the crippled children,
or something. But I couldn't get any sense
out of little Van , and finally I got to talk
to the Crippled Children woman and she had
gotten the facts.
Little Van was up there in Andrews' Clinic, and
the doctors and nurses come around every day
and they examined them stumps and all; and one
morning they made a terrible mistake, she fo und
out . They walked right outside his door , with
the door standing slightly open, and him in
there in the room, in t he bed, I reckon; the
clothes in the closet. They got right outside
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the door and stood and had 8 conference,
and they begaD to talk about, "Well, if we
cut here and cut there and cut ••• 11 They
used the word "eut", and little Van, he
got out of the bed, or wherever he was, and
he got his clothes and got them on and scooted
out of that room and was down the highway,
headed to Gee's Bend all the way from Tuskegee ,
when some of the hospital personnel caught him,
found him.
And he put his foot down , what little foot be
had, and he was going home; and they had to
send him home, and he never did get the opera­tion.
But he grew up grown, and married, and even
got a car with special controls and learned to
drive it. And be got up • • •• I don't know how
old Little Van was when be died. Folks told
me a peculiar tale. He got to preaching; and
he used to sing for us . Had a bass voice when
he got full grown; he had a deep bass voice .
I'm a bass, so I'd get over there a few times
and get him over there at the school where they
had church, had a piano, and I ' d work with him
on the bass, you know, how to carry bass, really
carry it; and he'd pick it up and always act
like he appreCiated it. But he got to be a
preacher, too. But there came a year when
he told •• •• those folks swear that Little Van
told them one year, "I won't live out this
year", and didn't. He died . Died , apparently,
of natural causes. Just died.
That's a barn; lot . Drinking water from a
spring . A lot of that went on before the
government got in there .
There's your canning plant .
many were over there . I got
the home supervisor, though .
I don ' t know how
an idea that's
Pressure cooker. Now , that looks like a home
size canner. They had some of those giant
ones . I saw some of them around. Been down
to the spring . Meals . Cooking in the fire ­place.
Oh, that looks like Edgar Mooney's
wife there. Sho looks like her. I don't
remember who she is.
Look at the old fashioned shoes. Look at that
cook stove, there.
They just put the stove pipe up the chimney,
didn't they?
Setting up in
the chimney.
ramp.
the fireplace, with the
That's a bale of cotton
pipe up
on that
Now, these picket fences around there, that
was a little unusual, wasn ' t it?
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Yeah , but that used to be standard procedure,
to rive out those pickets from even pine logs .
Get the str aight, the long , straight pine . It
would split 8asy . And ther e was a cer tain time
of the year it would split easier . My daddy
knew when pine would split easy . I don ' t know
whether it was when the sap was down in the
winter time, or up in the Bummer. It would
split Basier.
Now , is that 8 martin house up there?
Yeah , bluebird, martin . They put it up for
martins, ' cause they didn't grow any gourds,
I reckon . That's your old canning center.
Four. They had four of them over there . It
tells you there . I was thinking it was five
or six .
There ' s one of the brand new barns, see there?
Did they build the barns before they did the
houses? Somebody told me about that .
They might have , I don't know . See , they ' d have
8 different crew building the house from building
t he barn . There used to be a man with Farm
Security, and then Farmers Home , Dick Bedding­field.
Mr. Dick went up pretty high . He was a
District Supervisor with Vocational Agriculture
at one time . Anyway, Mr . Dick told me this
funny tale . He came down to go to Gee ' s Bend
one time, in the construction end of it , and
he drove up to a house under construction; had
the roof on it and the walls , the outside walls ,
about completed , finishing the inside . He
called on one of the Pettways there , he couldn ' t
remember which one, but he knew he WBS a Pett­way
, standing there, and he said, "You remember
those Pettways never would crack a smile?1I
I said, IITh at ' s right . EspeCially if you was
a stranger, they wouldn ' t joke , had no sense of
humor. If it was a white man ' s joke •• • • flat .
They didn ' t get the pOint . " I learned, don ' t
tell them a white man ' s joke, because they ' d
take it dead seriously . You ' d give them the
punch line , and they ' d think, what did he do
that for? So, anyway , he said this man Pettway ,
he caught on he was going to live in this house .
So he said, "I thought I ' d strike a conversa­tion
. " I said" "I understand this is gOing to
be your house . I Said, "Yas , SUh . 1I His shaCk
was right there , the log house was right
there beside him . Building a new house right
by it. He said, "It ' s gOing to be a nice house,
guess you ' ll like it . You ought to like it."
And he said, "Naw , suh, I don't like it . "
Just like that . He said , "How come you don ' t
like it?" He says , IIToo little , ain ' t big
enough . 'I He said , "What do you mean , it ain't
big enough? It ' s got three bedrooms in it. 1I
Said, "It still ain' t big enough . " He said ,
"How many chillun you got? How big a family
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you got?" Said, "I got a wife and six kids . II
And he said, "My Lord, you can get ••• you
ought to be able to get in that . 11 He said,
"Well, the trouble is , my oldest girl and my
wife both is looking up now."
That ' s the way Mr. Dick told it, and he said,
t'Last year my wife had twins. II He said he could
imagine that this man was figuring his wife
had twins last year, now she's going to have
twins again, and the daughter will, too; and
thet 1s going to be four more mouths to feed.
And be said there were some little cut off
pieces of board on the floor, the ground there,
and he picked them up , two of them . Said be
knew he wouldn't know what he was talking about
if I said liS double decker bed" or lI s tacked
bedell, he wouldn't know wbat he meant because
he'd never seen them. He said, "I tell you
what you're going to have to do . You 're going
to have to fix you up some beds for them kids
where you 'll have one bed up there and one bed
down here; one bed above the other and they
won't take up as much room . One kid up there
and one kid down there." Said he looked at
that a little bit and he says, "Cap, it won't
work . 'I He said, "Why won It it work?" Said ,
"It won' t take up as much room as beds or
ftallets, either." He said, "It won't work."
'Why won't it work?" He said, "'Cause that
one up there on the top gain' to wet on that
one on the bottom." Mr . Dick said, "I left
there thinking he'd sleep them on a pallet,
and when they'd wake up in the morning, all
over the house , the whole pallet was wet."
But Mr . Dick was a piatol ball .
You know, I told you while ago that was the
school and church, and they bad church in it.
I was wrong . This was the original school
building over there. That's right. It was a
separate building. That was the school building
where one hundred and eight students received
their training in the three R' s. You know,
they didn't get much school. That old man
there must have been dead when I got to
Gee's Bend, but there's his ox with •��• what'd
I tell you his name was? •• Haynes , Stokes
Haynes .
Is that Stokes Haynes?
Ub, huh . Plowing an old ox . There was an old
man named Collins Pettway . And a peculiar thing
is Collins ••• and that son is dead now, Collins
had a son that they all said it was his son ,
but he was red beaded.
I ' ve seen albino twins over there.
But be had red, distinctive kinky red hair.
But bis son ' s dead now . He died a few years
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ago and he was relatively young when he died .
I don't • • • oh, he died building Jones Bluff Dam .
He worked on the construction of Miller ' s
Ferry .
That looks like a real brick ~ i mney there, too.
Those fishing poles were cut in the swamp,
weren't they?
Yeah , cut in the swamp . Cane break .
There were two different spellings of Bendorfs.
There was 8 Patrick Bendorf, Sr. , and Patrick
Bendo!f, Jr. Both had farms and both already
dead. Old man Patrick was a real old character .
He was a good old man . He raised a bunch of
grandchildren . When I ' d go over there , he'd
have about twelve kids in his house , and they
was grandchildren or great grandchildren. He 's
going on 8S big an operation as any of them
over there , and him an old man . Still plowing .
He could out- ploW them . But he had enough
grandchildren over there he didn ' t have to, but
he ' d get in there and pitch . But they spelled
their name B- e - n- d- o- f - f. But there was another
set over there and they spelled theirs
B- e-n-d- o- l - p- h , like I think it's truly
supposed to be . Well , Jacob wasn ' t ••• • if he
was related to Patrick and old man Patrick and
young Patrick , I don ' t know; but there was a
dist inct difference in spelling . I never did
learn why the difference , ' cause they couldn ' t
tell me .
I r emember when I first started going to Gee ' s
Bend, there was an old man over there , that
they used to tell me was a blacksmith, who used
to sharpen plows . He ' s sharpening a sweep
right there. There ' s his forge , heat it over
there and then sharpen it while it was hot .
And this old man, they told me at one time he
had a blacksmi th shop, and at one time had a
little farm over there ; but he and his wife
got old and they gave it up. And the government
took it in the government inventory, or maybe
they never did sell it to him. He had a
pro ject house . But it was standing vacant
when I got there , and I got busy and later sold
it . And I can ' t remember his name . He was a
Pettway . But he had something wrong around
his nose here, and I always wondered kind of
what it was. And I was always running up on
Dr. Paul Jones, and he td tell me some crazy
tal e , and he told me about this man , i f it ' s
the one . He said it was the blacksmith; he
said some of thos e Pettways got hol d of him
to come over there, they needed to see him •• •••
No , they brought him in to his office, which
was down her e then . Said they brought that man
in there and said, "Something wrong with his
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nose. II And says, "I ��ot him in there and
started examining him I, and he said, lIyou
won't believe what 1'm going to tell you
I found wrong with him. He had screw worms. 1I
You know they attack cattle wounds, and all .
He said, "I finally p icked it out of him, that
he went to sleep on the porch one day, and
his nose had been bleeding . 1I That nose bleed
was the key to the whole thing, because those
screw worm flies were attracted to blood. And
from that he developed screw worm up in his nose.
And he said, "That I s one time when an MD got
hold of a vet. II He said, III called Shine
Hollinger (Camden Vet) in on that deal . II And
somehow or other, they couldn't just treat it
wi th ordinary dressing that they used to kill
screw worms. They had to use something to
make them come out, fly out, get out of his
head. They had gone up in his nasal passages .
Why, they would have killed h im, wouldn't they?
But he said , "We saved that old man. Saved
him. II He was getting up in years then. He
slept out on the porch in the hot summertime.
Got out there 'cause it was too hot in the
house. And I'm inclined to believe this was
him , only I knew him when he was an old man .
But he had quit blacksmithing.
Now, this is Clement. That was Clemen t .
He had tuberculosis, it says .
He had, and I wasn't aware of the TB of the
lungs, but Dr. Dickson said he had TB of t he
bone, in that stiff leg . Here's Edgar Mooney .
That's his crib, in a wet barn .
That old man, that man was William Benning .
His wife, I think, is still living down in
Whites , back off to the left. You have to
drive down that hill on a gravel road. You get
down ther e and the first ~oad just past Rosa
Kennedy ' s house, turn left, and it's Benning
property . Now , his farm is one unit. Wasn 't
split up like the rest of them. Those are
dug wells. They were dug, and I don't imagine
there was any curbing below the ground .
Were you down there when Miss Lula Palmer was
down there? Lula Palmer, from Montgomery?
No , I never did know her. I've heard that name.
Well , I think she opened the nursery school.
She had probably gone by the time you were
down there .
I'm sure she was there before I was. There's
one of those new pumps, new wells, with a
concrete slab around i t. Those things lasted
B. LeCroy:
37
for years, but Boston Kennedy told me that
some of them still worked up until not too
many years ago. Oh, Bnd they took the old
hand pump out and put an electric pump in
there. They had plenty of water, the well
did, and Boston Kennedy," .he and his brother,
Johnny, would fix wells, put in and install
electric pumps and fix them. Of course,
they got city water now, ftublic water. But
Boston told me, he said, 'You know, those
cast iron casings that went deep in the ground,
just finally rusted out. 1I And that was forty
something years they lasted. I was surprised;
they had enough iron, 11m sure, in the water.
That's Houston Kennedy. He's a young man,
there. Houston, I used to laugh, Houston's
wife, they lived across the creek. You found
out where across the creek is? Go right
along in front of where the old store used
to stand, follow the black top 'til you get
down there when the end of the black top is.
Turn hard left and get back on dirt them .
You go down, go on over the hill, go 'cross
a wooden bridge •• ••• •
(End Side 2 , Tape 2)